Christmas might be the most wonderful time of year, but it’s also the most wasteful. Food waste goes up by around 30%over the festive period, stacking up to an eye-watering 42 million plates worth of discarded food.
There are obviously big environmental considerations there. But for the restaurant industry, it’s a financial problem, too. Food waste is a persistent issue that dogs the hospitality sector at the best of times, costing a staggering £3.2 billion a year in the UK. It’s estimated that 10% of food bought by restaurants ends up being thrown away before it is even cooked and served, while another 17% is left uneaten. When you factor in wasted inventory, labour and energy costs, that adds up to a loss equivalent to 6% of total sales.
In an industry experiencing acute input cost pressures, losses from food waste amount to a double hit to margins. Luckily, every restaurant already has a tool at its disposal that can help to get a grip on waste – its POS system.
Your POS doesn’t just process sales. It logs every dish ordered and sold, creating a rich data resource. Most modern restaurants also run inventory and kitchen management systems through their POS, too. That makes it easy to compare what’s bought against what’s sold, allowing you to identify where waste is occurring, and take action to reduce it.
Here are five examples of how to do that in practice.
Real-time inventory tracking
By integrating POS, inventory and kitchen management systems, you can track inventory through its entire journey from purchase, customer orders, preparation and finally to dishes going out to tables. At every point, the POS updates stock levels automatically. This gives you a reliable level of insight to avoid over-ordering and using ingredients within their shelf life. It also lays down a foundation of intelligence on which you can establish other waste-saving measures.
Demand forecasting and sales analysis
The first of these other measures is demand forecasting. Sales volumes in restaurants vary with the seasons, making it important to adjust inventory to avoid waste. Looking back at previous sales patterns helps to anticipate demand and plan ingredient purchases accordingly.
Menu optimisation
Sales data from your POS also shows which dishes customers love and which ones rarely get ordered. If something is consistently slow to sell or leads to a lot of leftover ingredients, the most cost-effective solution is often to cut it from the menu entirely. Similarly, packing your menu with the most popular sellers helps to ensure inventory moves quickly, minimising waste.
Portion control and recipe costing
Every dish sold by a restaurant is costed based on a specific recipe. Varying from this recipe makes cost and waste control harder, either by sending more out on the plate than is costed into the price charged, or by leaving ingredients unused and potentially wasted. Integrated kitchen management systems improve consistency by making the costed recipes readily available to kitchen staff, and by monitoring what actually goes out of the kitchen. This reduces accidental over- and under-portioning.
Waste logging and auditing
Finally, many modern restaurant POS systems include tools that let teams record specific waste incidents and why they happened – anything from spoilage to prep mistakes or plates coming back unfinished. Having this detail makes it much easier to spot recurring issues and fix them directly.