How To Solve The Biggest Problem With Food Costs As A Restaurant Owner

Chances are, if you’re a bustling restaurant in the Twin Cities, you’re relying on vendors to provide your food. Unlike retail, where the day revolves around scanning every item. Running a restaurant leaves little time for scanning inventory and counting lettuce leaves.

Usually, you leave it to vendors to keep your business well stocked. Food and drink vendors can make or break a business. If you have amazing vendors, the quality of your food will be amazing (provided your cooks don’t burn it).

However, when you work with vendors, sometimes you may feel in the dark about your food costs as a restaurant owner.

It can feel like you can’t audit your food costs

Being in a position where you only receive a bill twice a week from your vendor can quickly become a strained relationship. You often find yourself wondering when looking at the bill “Am I getting a fair price for this?”

This becomes even more of a headache when you’re trying to reconcile your costs at the end of the month, and track your profit margins.

You can make sense of your costs though

Food costs can be one of the biggest mistakes restaurant owners can make, so don’t ignore your vendor statements.

Using a great Point-of-Sale system like Restaurant Manager has built in tools that help you consolidate your vendor invoices and your menu prices to track your food costs.These features can work with an additional tool, called U.S Foods Menu Builder Pro.

U.S Foods Menu Builder Pro gives you real time data of the current prices for all your food items, whether it be meat, cheese, or wine, U.S Foods Menu Builder Pro has instant updates to food prices.

What this means for tracking your food costs

This nifty little tool integrates with Restaurant Manager and other POS systems, and lets you remove some of the haze from your food costs with your vendors.

You can take your receipt from your vendors, and compare it to U.S Foods Menu Builder Pro. It lets you know if you’re being overcharged, but also allows you to see the current costs of beef, cabbage, and the rest of your menu items.

Having that kind of tracking helps you plan for the future and lets you know if you need to raise your menu prices.

Don’t live in the dark about your food costs

You can control and stay on top of your food expenses. With the right tools, you can make sure your profiting off your hard work, and covering your business’ costs through your food prices.

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