Keeping food costs under control requires constant vigilance. The slightest laxity can affect your restaurant's profitability, jeopardizing your margins and, consequently, overall financial results.
The risks of poor inventory management
Why is this crucial?
Let's look at some of the statistics we've seen from our customers:
When inventories are carried out regularly and accurately, profits can rise by 24% a year.
By tracking inventory on a weekly basis, restaurant chains can boost their bottom line by up to 10%.
Retailers who adopt digital solutions to automate inventory tracking reduce their food costs by up to 5%.
😬 Yet many restaurant chains are not yet exploiting these opportunities:
43% of restaurants do not track their inventories on a regular basis.
63% of restaurateurs do not regularly check their supply chain.
The impact on a restaurant chain
A poorly organized inventory can quickly lead to considerable financial losses:
On average, a restaurant can throw away up to €41,000 worth of food a year, or around €112 every day. What's more, overstocking, combined with a lack of regular monitoring, encourages theft.
This represents a daily loss of €90 per restaurant. For a chain of 10 restaurants, this translates into an annual loss of €720,000.
Few brands can withstand such a financial impact.
This is where the importance of precise, rigorous raw material inventory management comes into play.
By putting processes in place and applying them on a daily basis, you can reduce food waste due to expired best-before dates. It also helps to limit theft, reduce stock discrepancies and ultimately protect your margins.
A checklist of best practices for managing your inventories
Here are a few key points to optimize your inventory management:
Carry out regular inventories: We recommend that you carry out an inventory every month , and more regularly for expensive products such as meat or fish.
Standardize your inventories: Writing down your inventory method makes it easier to standardize across several sites.
Train your teams: Every member of staff needs to understand the importance of rigorous inventory management.
Record all actions. Note every stock movement, such as receipts and issues. Include transfers too. This will give you a clear view of each store.
Automate inventory management: As your business grows, digitalize inventory management. This will enable you to keep track of your inventory in real time, accurately and effortlessly.
Link between inventory management and the supply chain
Effective inventory management is closely linked to well-controlled purchasing. If purchasing is not optimized, it will be difficult to maintain good inventory control. It is therefore crucial to adopt rigorous practices for both processes.
Optimize your procurement
Poor supply chain management can lead to costly mistakes. To remain competitive, it is essential to implement good procurement practices:
Standardize your processes: Written procedures enable you to train new staff quickly and evaluate new suppliers.
Buy according to demand: define minimum stock levels and use order forecasting to avoid overstocking and anticipate out-of-stock situations.
Negotiate with your suppliers: Contractualize bulk purchasing to obtain better prices, even for basic products such as sugar or oil.
Optimize your purchase orders: They must be clear and detailed, including quantity, quality, pack size and price.
Check deliveries: Make sure that each delivery corresponds to the order form before proceeding to payment.
Check invoices: Regularly compare invoices with deliveries to avoid paying for products not received or damaged.
Automate: Just as with inventory, supply management software can help you achieve greater precision and efficiency.
Automate your inventory management
Inventory and supply management are crucial to maximizing restaurant profitability.
At Yokitup, we've developed a tool specially designed to support expanding franchise networks and restaurant chains. We enable restaurateurs to automate their inventory management processes and simplify the day-to-day work of their field teams.
Yokitup centralizes your data to provide you with key performance indicators to help you make better decisions.
Here are just a few of Yokitup's features to help you automate your inventory management:
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