I’d say that about 90% of the food businesses that I’ve worked with had some form of inventory control in their head. That means one person does all of the ordering and that’s mostly okay as long as the one person can always do the ordering. That also assumes that that one person is not more valuable to the business elsewhere. Most often what happens with growth is that the one person tries to hand the inventory off to another but that second person never does a good job. The system was built idiosyncratically and therefore is not replicable. The second person is bound to fail by definition. I can’t tell you the number of times that I’ve been brought in to develop a training system because the number 2 person isn’t succeeding. So… with all of that being said I highly recommend a replicable and scalable system from the get go. And, in running a kitchen business in any form will need a food inventory spreadsheet for two reasons; the first to track purchases and understand one’s costs. The second reason is to create consistency and above all not run out of the product.
I create a food inventory spreadsheet very simply in Excel by listing the categories of ingredients then the individual ingredients within the categories and then across the top row I put in the date and thereby use the same sheet week after week to help me get a sense of the usage and rhythm of the ingredients.
Let me know if I can help you customize a food inventory spreadsheet to help reduce food cost and waste- leave a comment and I’ll get back to you.
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