Diffuse Ticking Time Bombs through Inventory Control

From delivery truck to service, food makes quite a voyage through your restaurant. It’s a trip that must be monitored to ensure maximum profitability with cost controls in conjunction with food safety management.

Aged or spoiled food can affect your restaurant business in many ways. Spoiled food, regardless of whether it makes it to the dining room, costs your restaurant real money. Throwing out aged ingredients is great for food safety, but more can be done to ensure that less food goes to waste.

Purchasing

Reducing ingredient spoilage starts with your purchasing process. To get good ingredients, you need to clearly specify to your vendors what you expect. For example, you could create purchase specifications for lettuce that state that lettuce delivered to your restaurant must be a healthy green color with no loose leaves and no brown leaves.

You can also specify the level of ripeness desired of certain produce. For example, tomatoes are typically available in six stages of ripeness. Select an appropriate degree of ripeness to avoid spoilage and plan ahead for usage over time by ordering them in several stages of ripeness.

Receiving and Inspecting

Check each food ingredient product for temperature, weight, quality and freshness as it arrives your establishment. Smell, feel, even taste the product if in doubt – and make sure it meets your expectations before it enters your storage area.

Make sure that refrigerated items arrive at proper temperatures, usually 41 degrees Fahrenheit or below. It doesn’t matter how well you keep it in your place, if food has been stored improperly in transit, the spoilage process could be underway. If a product does not meet your standards, again, refuse to accept it.

Storing

Immediately unpack and store food items. Repackage items in uniform, translucent plastic containers that seal tightly to extend the food product's life. Mark each item with the date it was received. Many products and systems are available to streamline and organize this critical process.

Rotating your stock helps reduce spoilage. Use the First in First out (FIFO) storage method. Using this method, new items are shelved behind the stock you already have. Once items have been properly shelved, use items stored in the front first.

Using Your Ingredients

Make sure employees always check the use-by or expiration date on products. Teach your staff a policy on how to handle perishable foods by date, smell and sight.

Inventory most foods on a daily basis so that you'll know how much shelf life they have left. If you realize that you have an excess amount of a particular item, develop a daily special that uses the product before it spoils.

For more detailed information, including descriptions of electronic systems to help with inventory control, check out Efficient Foodservice Response (EFR), a joint project sponsored by 13 industry trade associations created to help foodservice manufacturers, brokers, distributors and operators find ways to eliminate an estimated $14.3 billion in non-value adding costs from the supply chain.

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