xtraCHEF: Controlling the Chaos
The welcoming, comforting ambience that a restaurant works hard to create for their guests sets the stage for a meal that will hopefully bring those customers back. However, behind the elegant scenes of the dining room, beyond those kitchen doors, there are busy, complex and often chaotic operations that not only make the guest’s meal possible but keep the lights of the restaurant on. The back-of-the-house, or BOH, is where the real meat and potatoes of running a restaurant business are brought to bear.
Beyond running a food service operation, restaurant operators, caterers, and the like need to run profitable businesses. Profitability is key to the growth and sustainability of any business, and restaurants are no exception. Controlling costs, especially as a restaurant grows and opens new units, is critical. With the rising costs of labor, real estate and utilities throughout each segment of the industry, the operators that get a grip on the chaos of their business and better manage the margins of their food and beverages sales are the only ones that will survive and thrive.
For many operators, this is actually much more difficult than it sounds. Aside from the rising costs mentioned above, the prices of key ingredients fluctuate on a daily basis. Historically, the only way to truly know the impact of constantly fluctuating and unpredictable prices was to manually and painstakingly record this information in notebooks, spreadsheets and, for more sophisticated operators, a robust restaurant management system. That said, all of the information still needed to be manually keyed into those systems.
At the end of the month, keen operators may notice a change in the Cost-of-Goods-Sold (COGS) when reviewing their Profit-and-Loss (P&L) statements. Others just pay their bills and go about business as usual for the following period. Not only was this information accessible much later than when it would be valuable, it required hours of their employees’ time spent processing paper invoices, manually keying or transcribing data from one place to another.
"We add value by bringing transparency to the procurement process and allow our customers to use the accurate data that we capture to make better purchase decisions, manage their inventory and ultimately boost margins"