Food Cost Management

Three Food Cost Management Reports You Need Now!

The last few years have been exhausting and unreliable for those who work in foodservice. COVID, labor shortages, and supply chain issues have put restaurants through the wringer.

Managing your food cost is one of the easiest ways to understand the health of your restaurant. It also allows you to identify where there may be hidden problems and where take action before it’s too late.

Traditionally, managing food cost was a time intensive, manual process. Taking inventory, collecting invoices, and updating spreadsheets was the bane of every restaurant employees’ existence. With the cards stacked against you in the current environment, who has time to invest in this old school process?

We have identified the three most important reports that restaurants need today. These solutions give you insights and analytics that are guaranteed to put time back in your day. This means you can run a more profitable restaurant.

If you’re not already managing your food cost using technology, now is the time to start by utilizing Food Cost Management from Dining Alliance.

Food Cost

Food Cost Percentage is number one. This is what determines the health of your restaurant. It’s the overreaching number everyone should know. It is what dictates how your restaurant is doing.

The average food cost should be around 30%, although this solely depends on the type of restaurant you’re running, which means this percentage can change whether you’re a steakhouse or a burger joint.

To calculate this percentage, you would take your beginning inventory, add your purchases, subtract your ending inventory and divide by your total food sales for that time period.

Calculating food cost may seem fairly easy at first, but when you’ve got a million other things piling up to take care of, it can be forgotten about. When you fall off track once, it becomes very difficult to recover.

By using Food Cost Management from Dining Alliance, you can say goodbye to doing the calculations yourself. No more spreadsheets and no more manual entries. Nobody has time for this in 2022.

Price Fluctuations

Like we mentioned before, when you’re occupied with other work, you won’t have time to check if the price of ground beef went up.

If a certain item increases in price by 2% that week, you’ll need to figure out whether or not you should stop buying the item as a whole or switch suppliers. When this happens for multiple items on your menu, it just becomes too chaotic to handle on your own.

Who has time to keep up with fluctuating prices? Not you.

Utilizing Food Cost Management from Dining Alliance updates you in real time when a supplier has increased or decreased prices, making it a lot easier to make better business decisions for your operation. You’ll be able to know when a price rises and how it affects your food costs in real time.

No more surprises on your invoices. Knowing exactly when items increase in price will put you at ease.

Recipe Costing

By embracing technology, you get access to the most up-to-date prices. This not only means paying the right prices on ingredients you use every day but also making sure you’re charging the right prices for your menu items.

If an item has gone up in price and you have no choice but to keep it on your menu, this means you have to make some price adjustments to make sure you’re hitting the right margins.

Being a restaurant that offers takeout and third-party delivery services, you also have to take into consideration the fees you’re paying for those too. If Grub Hub or UberEATS takes 30% of your burger price, this means it’s time to increase the price you’re charging.

You have to keep up with all areas of your operation. Whether it’s how much you’re spending on an ingredient or how much a delivery service is charging to deliver to a customer—if each point of this process isn’t aligned, you’ll be missing margins—and nobody can afford to do that.

Food Cost Management Technology

We know managing your food cost is hard to take control of when you’ve got many things on your plate. We also know that managing your food cost is crucial to succeeding in the foodservice industry.

That’s why we’ve created Food Cost Management technology for operators like you. When you’re struggling to hit the margins you need and your staff is exhausted and overworked, you can always count on technology to save you both time and money.

Join Dining Alliance today not only for exclusive savings and discounts on items you purchase every day, but for our new Food Cost Management technology that will help keep your operation profitable and running successfully!

Already a Dining Alliance member? No problem! Login to your My Dining Alliance Portal today and get started!