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Restaurant Food Prep: How to Improve Your Prep Process for Kitchen Efficiency
Your food prep can highlight how efficient (or inefficient) your back of house operations are.
The food prep cycle is a continuous process at every restaurant. Receiving ingredients from vendors, then creating delicious products from recipes, and finally serving customers satisfying meals. But it can be a different process for almost every restaurant.
We've seen it many times — even if an operation has the same menu across all its locations, there are usually inconsistencies to the prep process. But food prep is critical to the guest experience. To create repeat, loyal customers, every dish needs to be prepared properly according to the recipe and in a timely manner.
Why is the prep process so different across same-brand locations?
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The dynamic of when and which menu items are sold make accurate preparation planning a very difficult target to hit.
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Kitchen employees often make a habit out of prepping food. We hear “this is what I make every day…” a lot. Sometimes bad habits are hard to break and can hurt your kitchen's efficiency and food cost control.
- Lack of data to make informed decisions about when to prep to be prepared for customer orders.
The Challenges of Planning Your Food Prep
Prep isn't always easy or straightforward, but there are a few variables that have a direct effect on your guest’s experience and your restaurant’s bottom-line profits. These food prep variables include:
- Food Quality Control – Freshness is key to satisfied customers. But if you prep too early, you could risk the menu item losing quality by the time it makes it onto your guest's plate. Timing is key to quality control.
- Controlling Food Costs – If quality control is good, but you are regularly throwing away over-produced product, your food costs will be higher due to unnecessary waste.
- Navigating Fluctuations in Sales – It can be difficult to predict how much food to prep. But being too frugal with your prep, for fear of elevating food cost or compromising freshness, might result in an 86’d menu item which isn't helping elevate your guest's experience. If there is a ‘no 86’ policy, someone will have to prep on the fly which could quickly derail service times.
- Challenges with Consistency — Consistent production means making your prep recipes accurate and in the right batch sizes every time. This requires accurate, real-time information and a fully trained team. But this can be especially difficult when you experience regular turnover or have new team members training in the kitchen.
Planning Your Food Prep With a Back Office System: An Easier Solution
A quality restaurant back office solution should multiple feature options available to help restaurant operators get a handle on prep planning:
Look for these core features:
- Support for the Complete Prep Cycle – Beginning with creating a sales forecast, managing menu items, prepping your items, counting finished products in your inventory, and everything in between. For maximum efficiency, we recommend that your central master inventory is tied to centralized recipe management program
- Recipe Database — For quality control and consistency, ensure you can store all recipes in an easy-to-use database for lookup. It should include easy-to-understand recipe builds and quality control points. Features for menu engineering and portioning analysis are also highly recommended for greater cost control.
- Suggested Prep Counts — This is so important, we consider it a non-negotiable. Your system should recommend prep amounts of all your critical items based on the forecasted consumption. Look for a system that understand shelf life of your produced items. Bonus points for a system that fully supports the forecasting of sub recipes down to 15 levels.
- Ability to Log Prepped Items in Inventory — Once an item is prepped, you still need to keep track of it. For example, if you prepped soup with 11 different ingredients. Your inventory system should still have a record of the 8 onions, and 15 tomatoes, and all of the other items that went into your prepped item.
- AvT reports — To keep a grip on food costs, once you've completed prep of each product, you need a report to reveal exactly how your food costs are trending.
What's your plan?
Remember, food prep is a process. With the right back of house application, your restaurants should feel supported with a variety of flexible options to choose to how you manage your prep process.
Ready to learn more about food prep and how we can help make your process better? Reach out to us!