Conduct regular price comparisons from different suppliers to ensure you are getting the best deals on your ingredients.

Negotiate with suppliers for volume discounts and build strong relationships with them. Stay informed about market trends and potential fluctuations in food prices, allowing you to make informed decisions about when and how to make purchases.

Reducing food costs in your restaurant requires strategic planning, efficient management, and team effort. By implementing these strategies, you can optimize your budget, reduce waste, and maintain the quality of your culinary offerings. With prudent cost management, your restaurant can thrive in a competitive market while providing an excellent dining experience to your customers.

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Toggle navigation. Home Agenda Media Sponsors Venue Venue Blog Contact Us Reserve My Seat. Smart Menu Engineering Begin by analyzing your menu to identify high-cost items and low-profit dishes. Efficient Inventory Management Implement a robust inventory management system to track your stock effectively.

Embrace Seasonal and Local Produce Opt for seasonal and locally sourced produce whenever possible. Portion Control Implement portion control measures to avoid unnecessary waste and control serving sizes. Minimize Food Waste Monitor and analyze food waste patterns to identify areas for improvement.

Staff Training and Communication Invest in training your staff, particularly those involved in food preparation and purchasing. Regular Price Analysis Conduct regular price comparisons from different suppliers to ensure you are getting the best deals on your ingredients.

Manage Food Cost at Your Restaurant with California Lodging Investment Conference Reducing food costs in your restaurant requires strategic planning, efficient management, and team effort. Sign Up For Our Newsletter.

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Be fully transparent, explaining the reasoning behind the changes and encouraging staff to be mindful of energy usage. Restaurants can be slow to remove dishes or trim down their menu, but it often makes sense to do so.

Removing unpopular dishes cuts inventory costs, reduces food wastage and allows kitchen staff to focus on increasing the quality of the dishes you offer. The more dishes you have, the more inventory you need; as fresh food spoils fast, there is added pressure to sell less popular items before they spoil.

Removing these dishes removes the need to stock additional ingredients. Reducing menu size also makes for a better dining experience, as large menus can often be overwhelming for customers. To keep healthy margins, remove the least popular dishes from your menu, keeping only the best sellers and high-profit items.

Then make a conscious effort to reexamine your menu at regular intervals. It might be easier to keep staff on a set schedule, but from a cost-saving perspective it can be incredibly inefficient. Overstaffing — or staffing the wrong people — can put a huge strain on resources.

Get to know the cycle of busy and slow periods, and avoid overstaffing. This is not to say that you should be understaffed; while overstaffing can waste money, understaffing can lead to poor service, dissatisfied customers and damaged reputations.

Consumer behaviour evolves over time, too; recent research shows that Thursday is 'the new Friday' with more people having relocated to more rural areas and working from home more often.

Ask managers to pay particular attention to staffing over a short period of time, focusing on getting the balance right.

There are cost-cutting measures and cost-saving measures. Cost-cutting measures are things that reduce cost immediately and make an instant impact to your bottom line, such as changing to a cheaper dishwashing product or reducing portion sizes.

Cost-saving measures are measures that you take now that will reduce costs in the long run. A prime example of a cost-saving action is focusing on staff retention and making sure that the staff you have now are well supported and happy. When your employees stay with you for a long time, you save money on expenses like recruiting and training.

Think long-term when hiring — then make sure that employees feel respected, heard and appreciated. If they have complaints, try to deal with them in an efficient manner. Nutritics makes it easy for you to analyse your menu, manage waste and cut costs. Book your free demo today to see where you can save!

Look for the micro drivers of cost reduction In the s, American Airlines famously made a small change to the salads they offered passengers.

Get staff on board Without proper buy-in from employees, most cost-reduction strategies will fall flat. Reduce food waste Food waste is an enormous environmental issue that modern businesses can no longer afford to ignore.

Invest in energy-efficient appliances In the same vein as the previous point, restaurants can reduce energy costs by investing in energy-efficient appliances and being more mindful of usage. Reduce the size of your menu Restaurants can be slow to remove dishes or trim down their menu, but it often makes sense to do so.

Know your peak hours and staff accordingly It might be easier to keep staff on a set schedule, but from a cost-saving perspective it can be incredibly inefficient.

Make staff retention a priority There are cost-cutting measures and cost-saving measures.

1. **Meal Planning:** Plan your meals ahead to reduce impromptu dining out or ordering takeaway. 2. **Cook at Home:** Cooking at home Keep your kitchen organized. Know what you have on the shelves. Check every delivery thoroughly. Teach your people well. Never walk past a Missing

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Cost-cutting dining strategies - 10 Ways to Reduce Operating Costs in Your Restaurant · Work with food suppliers · Join a restaurant buying group · Control inventory · Minimize food waste · Reduce 1. **Meal Planning:** Plan your meals ahead to reduce impromptu dining out or ordering takeaway. 2. **Cook at Home:** Cooking at home Keep your kitchen organized. Know what you have on the shelves. Check every delivery thoroughly. Teach your people well. Never walk past a Missing

Become a social media expert on Instagram and Facebook, and start an email campaign. They are inexpensive marketing methods that are effective in reinforcing your brand and attracting new customers.

Overstaffing or staffing the wrong people can waste money. Get to know the cycle of slow periods at your restaurant to avoid overstaffing.

Then, identify the strengths of your employees and use them to your advantage. Depending on the appliance, you might not need to buy a brand new one.

This would be ideal for restaurants considering making renovations. Energy-efficient appliances can save your restaurant a great deal of money in the long run. Many states offer tax-credits and other incentives for restaurants that switch to energy-efficient appliances, so be sure to check out what is available in your state.

Any decision you make for your business will cost money; be savvy in how you spend your resources. Always be realistic about how much things cost and stay within budget; this mentality will help you to keep costs low in every situation. We save the most important point for last: Reward your employees for helping you meet cost-cutting goals.

Acknowledge their effort and reward them for their dedication. Need more information on LAVU and its programs and discounts for NMRA Members?

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Click here for instructions on how to enable JavaScript in your browser. Member Login Join Online Directory NMRA Community. Guest Blogger and NMRA endorsed provider LAVU has some great tips for your restaurant: 1. Train Your Staff Once they know the facts related to your new cost-saving strategy, train your staff.

Only Run a Full Dishwasher Running a half-empty dishwasher throughout the day is akin to throwing dollars down the drain. Soak Dishes Fill a sink with warm water and soak used plates instead of running hot water over them immediately. That figure includes how much money a restaurant would have to spend on lost productivity, rehiring, and training a new employee.

That means that for a team of 10 fast food employees, restaurateurs would have to hire — and retrain — up to 15 employees each year to replace the original ten 10 who left.

You can reduce your operating costs significantly by reducing turnover. Here are a few things you can do to keep team members happily employed:. That means payroll makes up almost one-third of operating costs for restaurants. The easiest way to reduce labor costs is to automate manual processes, which reduces payroll costs by making your employees more efficient.

When your employees can do more in less time with the help of technology, your business can schedule them for shorter shifts or to work less often. There are plenty of ways to automate manual processes.

For example, instead of only taking takeout orders over the phone, introduce online ordering so your hosts are free to help on-premise guests. Use self-serve kiosks to accept more on-premise orders with less staff help.

And instead of calling guests to remind them of reservations, use a reservations platform that automatically sends guests reservation reminders. Another option is to automate your inventory tracking.

Café Crêpe went from spending up to eight hours each week on accounting to less than one hour on it when they switched from a manual, paper system for inventory management to using inventory software MarketMan, which integrates with their TouchBistro POS. The more processed a food ingredient is, the more expensive it is.

For example, you could continue to buy the elaborate cakes on your menu pre-made from a local bakery, but start making simple cookies in-house, because the cost of ingredients like flour, sugar, and eggs are relatively cheap, and the recipe requires minimal manual labor.

While the food costs for certain dishes may be cheaper if you make them from scratch, you also have to factor in the labor costs, which could make those same dishes too expensive to make in-house.

Purchasing pre-made, or partially prepared, foods and ingredients can save you money in some cases. Live About suggests buying labor-intensive things like sauces, frozen French fries, baked goods, and pasta pre-made for the biggest savings. Another way to reduce operating costs is to lower your utility bills.

Restaurants use a lot of energy and water to prepare food, light dining rooms and kitchens, and keep the venue at the right temperature. Simple adjustments can help you make a positive impact on the environment AND save on utilities.

You can:. You can reduce payroll costs by using data to power your scheduling decisions. Look for employee scheduling software that integrates with your POS and incorporates data about historical demand, upcoming reservations, and even weather forecasts to build schedules that ensure you only schedule the staff you truly need.

If you are making efforts to reduce portion sizes, minimise waste and streamline resources, it is not enough to simply pass on instructions to staff; your team needs to be inspired to take action. Be transparent with staff. Knowing the numbers will help your team to visualise the impact of the changes.

With every cost-saving strategy you implement, make sure staff members are fully trained and understand the rationale. This will be key to inspiring real change at your restaurant. Food waste is an enormous environmental issue that modern businesses can no longer afford to ignore.

Luckily, waste reduction also makes sense from a purely cost-reduction perspective. One way to reduce food waste is to limit your excess inventory.

Monitoring and measuring is the first step in identifying the biggest sources of waste in your kitchen. Find out more ways to reduce kitchen waste here. In the same vein as the previous point, restaurants can reduce energy costs by investing in energy-efficient appliances and being more mindful of usage.

Go through your establishment, looking for ways to save money on utilities. Consider new processes and protocols to reduce energy use, and find energy drains. Changing to energy-efficient light bulbs is one example of a fast, effective and environmentally-friendly way of lowering your bill.

Once again, buy-in from staff will be incredibly important here. Most people are careful about how they use energy at home, turning off lights and unplugging appliances that are not in use.

However, in a work setting, attitudes become less stringent. Be fully transparent, explaining the reasoning behind the changes and encouraging staff to be mindful of energy usage.

Restaurants can be slow to remove dishes or trim down their menu, but it often makes sense to do so. Removing unpopular dishes cuts inventory costs, reduces food wastage and allows kitchen staff to focus on increasing the quality of the dishes you offer.