“Cut Costs, Cut Costs, Cut Costs”
- Every Restaurant Owner Ever.
One of the biggest concerns for any restaurant owner is to find ways to cut costs while keeping their quality of service consistent. Here is a quick list of actionable cost-cutting ideas that you can start applying to your restaurant today.
1. Negotiate With Your Suppliers.
Fluctuating food and supply prices can be frustrating, but everything can be negotiated. Does this sound like obvious advice? Maybe, but you would be shocked how many restaurant owners or GMs fail to negotiate. We know it can be scary. We also know you don’t have mountains of time.
Here are a couple of quick price negotiation tips that you can implement next time you’re dealing with your suppliers:
- Do your research, know what the prices are in the surrounding market for the supplies you need.
- Create a list of suppliers that carry the ingredients that you want and get quotes from each. Leverage your ability to go to another supplier to discuss better pricing.
- Connect with your community, restaurant owners, and customers to uncover better suppliers.
2. Manage Waste.
According to a Foodprint.org study, an average of 4-10% of food in restaurants is wasted before making it to a customer. That has a massive impact on your bottom line, cleaning and taking control of your food waste could help. Upcycling usable items that might otherwise be thrown away, reducing overproduction of specific ingredients that spoil quickly and logging/tracking food waste are a few quick and easy ways to cut down on costs associated with food waste.
3. Rethink & Redesign Your Food Prep.
Make a prep list, or go through your current prep list to see if there's room for improvement. Ask yourself what ingredients you need to prepare beforehand and which you can prepare to order. Prepped ingredients typically spoil faster, so establishing specific “prepped-to-order” ingredients will keep your food waste costs down.
4. Schedule Daily Time to Tackle Administrative Tasks.
Schedule a specific block of time, at the same time every day, to tackle administrative tasks like entering invoices. This will allow you to properly schedule your staff around that time to ensure you can focus on those tasks, which will ultimately save you time and allow you to get back to what you want to be doing.
5. Implement Strong Portion Control.
Develop consistent portion sizes for every element of your recipes measured by weight, volume, or quantity. Create instructions for each recipe to communicate portion sizes to your staff and standardize portion sizes across your menu to decrease complexity.
6. Connect With Other Restaurant Owners to Share Best Practices.
Restaurants are stronger when they work together. Sharing resources and information helps everyone. Reddit and LinkedIn provide excellent communities for restaurant owners looking to share ideas, ask questions or go on the occasional rant.
7. Stay Up to Date on Industry and Market Trends.
Knowledge is power, so collective knowledge is collective power. Stay informed on what the industry is doing, and it can help you differentiate yourself and provide valuable information about changes you should be making to your business.
About Savor
Savor helps restaurants, restaurant groups, and chains of all types control supply costs with less work.
With Savor restaurants can manage invoices, track product price histories, and drill down into expense categories. We help restaurants...
- Automatically catch rising prices before they spin out of control
- Benchmark prices for supplies against those paid by similar restaurants and bars
- Easily find alternative products and suppliers in their area
- Capture credits by automatically auditing invoices for errors
