Cutting costs is essential for all businesses, but it’s particularly important for companies operating in the food and hospitality industries. Restaurants can require a considerable amount of financial input, even once they’re well-established. By using our top cost-cutting tips, you can help to minimize your outgoings without having a negative impact on your customers.
Enter a prime vendor arrangement
Finding a reputable and reliable supplier is essential, particularly when you need them to provide fresh food on a daily or regular basis. Using different suppliers may give you more choice, but sticking with one supplier can help to minimize costs, whilst still providing you with a sufficient selection of goods.
Many suppliers offer prime vendor agreements for fixed terms, so you can agree to pay a certain percentage over the cost value of the product. Often, this is far cheaper than simply purchasing goods from a range of suppliers, and you may be surprised at just how much this could save you.
Reduce excess inventory
Restaurants owners need to have enough produce to cater for their guests, but having too much inventory can be a wasteful use of your resources. Managing your inventory more closely and reducing it where possible is a sure-fire way to bring your costs down. As customers won’t even be aware of this in-house modification, you can successfully reduce your costs without impacting your patrons.
Increase connectivity
In order to function effectively, you need to stay connected at all times. Whether you’re taking bookings from customers or dealing with suppliers, having reliable lines of communication is vital. However, many restaurants pay costly monthly fees simply to stay connected.
Instead, of sticking with the status quo, take a look a new and innovative connection options which could help you to minimize your costs. Using VoIP solutions to manage your incoming and outgoings calls is an ideal way to improve connectivity and reduce your outgoings, for example. With the opportunity to improve connectivity, a change like this will only enhance your customer’s experience.
Pre-portion ingredients
When kitchens get busy and the pressure is on, chefs may use or waste more produce than is necessary. All menu items should be prepared in accordance with a pre-agreed recipe, so portioning ingredients prior to service can be an extremely effective way of reducing waste. As well as minimizing the amount of produce that ends up in the trash, pre-portioning ingredients helps to maintain consistent meal preparation and ensures your customers can rely on you to deliver fulfilling and satisfying meals.
Cross-train staff
Whilst certain roles will require extensive experience and qualifications, there are many instances in which employees can be trained to undertake a number of roles. Instead of segmented your kitchen and bar staff, for example, why not train your bartenders as servers and vice versa? You can even train front-of-house staff as kitchen line workers, so you have a more varied pool of employees to rely on when things get busy.
