How Restaurants Determine Food Preparation Quantities
Curious why a precise inventory workflow matters? If you don’t have an optimised workflow, you could be losing money without even realising it.
Read this blog for a comprehensive roadmap to inventory management in restaurant operations!
Why Is It Vital to Plan Food Preparation Quantity in Restaurants?
In addition to mitigating spoilage and inventory theft, a thorough food preparation plan is as important for reducing revenue leakage as it is for maintaining customer satisfaction—the secret sauce to repeat visits, larger orders, and word-of-mouth marketing.
Inventory control in large-scale restaurant kitchens is not limited to the right ingredients available in the pantry, ready to meet the varied preferences of guests. Customer satisfaction also depends on the skilled chefs, the quality of the ingredients, and timely service.
Therefore, restaurant employees are tasked with juggling inventory level tracking, auditing the quality of ingredients frequently, and ensuring quick service time. This tough balancing act is almost impossible to maintain without a robust kitchen management software or an all-in-one restaurant ERPs, such as QPOS.
Notably, inventory tracking and production planning also become challenging due to the different kinds of inventory restaurants have:
- Raw inventory—freshly acquired fruits, vegetables, meat, cheese, etc., which can be preserved for some time
- Prepped inventory, i.e., chopped vegetables, deboned fish, thawed meat, and cheeses with low shelf life, among other items
- Pre-cooked ingredients, including sauces, gravies, and pizza bases, etc.
What Is the Role of Inventory Management Software in Determining the Food Preparation Quantity?
Kitchen Management Systems or holistic restaurant ERPs such as QPOS have a strong Analytics module that enables trend forecasting, which is at the heart of restaurant production planning. With the help of forecasting reports, users can identify the best-selling dishes, the most profitable dishes, and the rush hours. At the same time, thanks to forecasting, businesses can decode hidden patterns in historical sales data, thereby empowering decision-makers to anticipate seasonal demands.
Of course, the quality of reporting, i.e., how many complex factors can be crunched for decision-making, depends on the software’s Analytics capabilities. In that regard, QPOS ERP is, by and large, a few notches above the rest. Leveraging its Generative AI capabilities, QPOS can help users extract individual data points from large datasets and also customise the reporting as needed.
But can forecasting be done without inventory tracking? The answer is no, because inventory data is foundational for trend forecasting. However, kitchen management software alone never suffices for collecting inventory data—in the next section, let’s see why!
Know how QPOS doubles as an inventory management software for kitchens:
How Does A Kitchen Management Software Solve Restaurant Inventory Management Challenges?
Not only are forecasting, inventory tracking, and inventory planning interlinked, but they also depend on how well the restaurant management has upheld data integrity. Upholding the accuracy of inventory data can become a major challenge. Hence, to avoid fudged or poorly recorded data, a seamless workflow supporting continuous digitisation is non-negotiable.
This blog provides a straightforward guide to building an efficient inventory management workflow. When paired with restaurant ERPs, these steps create greater transparency and streamline kitchen operations.
How to Track and Audit Inventory with Kitchen Management Software?
Below are suggestions for the tools and the procedures to track raw inventory:
- Weighing Inventory for Tracking
- POS scales must be used to auto-register the details of the inventory weighed and create a digital log in the inventory management software for kitchens, installed into the POS Solutions ecosystem of the restaurant.
- Procured inventory must be weighed on the POS scale, and the readings tallied with the vendor’s Purchase Order.
- If either raw or prepped items are spoiled, employees should remeasure the amount fit for consumption to calculate the revenue leakage caused by spoilage accurately.
- Standardising recipes, whether for pre-cooked portions of the meals, such as gravies and sauces, or the entire dish, is vital for an economical use of inventory.
- The restaurant staff should regularly check the quality of pre-cooked bases for dishes and weigh the stock container on the days the base is used.
Apart from weighing the inventory batches, employees must rearrange them during audits based on their real-time condition, i.e., how close they are to the expiration date and how likely they will be used in a dish. This is a crucial step for quality control, but there are a few more steps, and let’s find out what they are.
Discover the stock management capabilities of QPOS ERP, designed as the comprehensive inventory management software for restaurants, supporting end-to-end operations management.
- Quality Control
- Before using an ingredient in the kitchen or while taking it out of the pantry, the item must be weighed on the POS scale.
- Ingredients should be prepped a day or two before the dish is cooked to ensure swift service time. This is especially relevant for seasonal menus such as Christmas specials. A key point to note is that the freshness of ingredients should be checked for spoilage before closing and after opening the kitchen.
How Do Inventory Tracking, Quality Control, and Forecasting Reports Influence Food Preparation Quantity?
To erron the side of caution, restaurants often have some leftover bases. Similarly, restaurant managers account for a margin for spoilage when they place procurement orders. This deliberate overstock can sometimes lead to a small near-expiration inventory.
In such scenarios, QPOS, with its Inventory Management and Recipe Management module, proves to be a transformative kitchen management software. While the inventory management alters chiefs of items that must be urgently used, the Recipe Management module helps them brainstorm ideas to utilise such items for specials.
Similarly, forecasts and market trends inform inventory planning and menu engineering, assisting decision-makers to determine the quantity of food that must be prepped in advance.
For example, let’s say an office building opens near a restaurant, attracting busy executives to grab lunch items, such as burgers, sandwiches, bagels, wraps, etc., that can be eaten on the go. Based on the most-sold items, the kitchen can keep a few items ready to be tossed into a toaster, a frying pan, or an oven to serve a quick snack.
Alternatively, the year-end sees a spike in continental, especially Italian and American dine-style cuisine across India. A few days before Christmas specials begin to be served, if historical data so suggests, a set of kitchen staff could busy themselves by cutting meat slabs into steak pieces. Simultaneously, another set of employees dedicated to the kitchen could prepare batches of pasta sauces and mayonnaise in a different kitchen counter for other popular dishes such as lasagna, pasta, and potato salad.
QPOS goes beyond being a kitchen management software, bridging front-of-house and back-of-house, while also offering remote access to restaurant performance Analytics.
Parting Note
While communicating with prospective clients, the executives at QPOS don’t just focus on the software capabilities of the platform. They go the extra mile and leverage their wealth of experience working with restaurants, fine dining venues, QSRs (Quick Service Restaurants), confectioneries, and franchise outlets, among other food outlet formats.
Based on their extensive industry insights, our experts are equally capable of helping restaurants set up a powerful restaurant operations management hardware suite that includes top-of-the-line POS terminals and peripherals, including POS scales. Further, our interactions focus on streamlining your operations for maximum ROI on operational costs, including workflows such as production planning, inventory tracking, and ideating specials, and
Hence, if you are looking for inventory management software for kitchens or kitchen management software for your restaurant operations that empowers you to drive customer satisfaction, QPOS might be the right platform for you.
We don’t just help you integrate each workflow; we also focus on understanding your goals, USP, and niche to help you streamline your processes during the integration process. Moreover, our support extends beyond software installation thanks to our customer service team that works round-the-clock.
Curious to know more? Contact us now to hit the ground running with optimised restaurant operations!
