5 Inefficient Kitchen Practices That Are Hurting Your Bottom Line

Your Hotel Food Service Operations Could Be Costing You

A failure to adapt is the kiss of death in any business. In today’s financial climate, updating your hotel food service operations is vital. As inflation hits every step of the food supply chain, you’ll want to make sure that you’re cutting costs where you can, without sacrificing quality.

We got together with Susan Forbes of Foodbuy Hospitality’s culinary consulting team to find out which practices are pitfalls for hotel and resort kitchens. Read more below.

1. Using Overly Large Portion Sizes

It’s no secret that US diners love their super sizes, but you can have too much of a good thing, especially in a higher end restaurant where ingredient quality is better. Shrinking the portions in your dishes slightly can add up to big savings. For example, you could use a 3 oz piece of salmon on your Caesar salad, rather than a 4 oz. Maybe the cheese in your burgers goes from 0.75 oz to 0.5 oz. It won’t take long to start seeing savings.

Watch this video from Joe Maher, Director of the Foodbuy Culinary Solutions Team explaining how to effectively adjust portions:

2. Retaining Your Standing Orders

You want your inventory to be in-check but placing orders for crowds that may not come isn’t a good idea. That’s why our culinary consulting team recommends setting a par level, then placing more orders if needed. Once you know the minimum product your hotel food service operations need to operate, you can eliminate unnecessary purchases.

3. Ordering From Too Many Different Vendors

Is your spend all over the map? It’s tempting to make agreements with multiple new suppliers when experiencing supply chain setbacks. However, this can leave you ordering more than you need and even purchasing overlapping products. Instead, you can focus on sourcing from Foodbuy’s contracted vendors. This provides both price protection, security of traceability and staying protected from roque price fluctuations.

4. Wasting Food Unnecessarily

Cutting down on food waste isn’t just good for the planet, it’s good for your business. Your hotel food service operations and food costs could be trending upwards if your kitchen staff is discarding ingredients and dishes before they need to. You can avoid these issues by enforcing protocol like:

Labeling ingredients and dishes with dates before storing

Training new kitchen staff in proper storage strategies

Using waste logs to track waste and set goals

If you’re not sure why your kitchens are producing so much waste, you can also organize a session with our culinary consulting team. Among other things, they can help you get to the bottom of your food waste issue.

5. Using Pre-Inflation Prices

If your menu prices don’t change, your food cost percentage is going to increase with inflation, and you’ll end up falling behind the market. The easiest way to solve this is by doing a market basket pricing comparison of like properties in your area. You can gauge where your prices should be using this comparison and calculate your ideal food cost percentage.

It’s easy to let kitchen practices fall by the wayside when managing a hotel or hotel group. However, monitoring spend on your hotel food service operations is a necessity. Do you want our help cutting costs in the kitchen? Read more about our culinary consulting services here.