You’re Not Focusing Enough on Profits (Really)
Food service management organizations operate in a unique space compared to more conventional restaurants, but that doesn’t mean they can afford to ignore the need to boost profits. Far from it – operators working in health care, universities and colleges, and other unique spaces need any extra help they can get to potentially offset budget cuts and other issues unique to their industries. Fortunately, you can take several tried-and-true strategies to shore up your profits and protect your position.
1) Make smart purchasing decisions
Food waste is a major threat to profitability. According to the NIH1 food service is responsible for 34% of food waste, and with ingredient prices higher than usual due to inflation, that’s a lot of revenue being spent only to rot in a landfill. Food service management organizations looking to improve profitability need to reduce their food waste by improving their inventory management systems to avoid redundant purchases and investing in forecasting to make future orders more accurate to past performance and demand.
2) Focus on work that matters
As important as working at reducing ingredient expenses is at the margins, you have much more control over making sure you’re getting the most out of your workers. Kitchens stuck on outdated systems spend hours manually managing inventories, tracking down ingredient information, and building menus and recipes – all time that could be spent on creating meals and experiences for customers. Organizations that want to survive need to invest in new platforms and processes to enable their employees to actually get productive work done.
3) Make your meals matter
Focusing on the back-office is vital for success, but you must ensure that the people on the other side of the counter are having a great time, too! According to the Harvard Business Review<2, improving customer retention by as little as 5% can boost profits by as much as 25%; this is great in pretty much any business, but especially for food service management organizations, whose customers have an increasing array of choices for culinary experiences. If you want to improve customer loyalty, you need to make sure you’re delivering great experiences for them; custom ordering, meal variety, and providing all the information they need to make informed decisions are all great places to start.
Boost your profits with Culinary Digital
If you don’t have the data, automation, or capabilities to improve your profitability with your current food service management software, Culinary Digital is ready to listen. Our platform features sophisticated inventory tracking and forecasting, centralizes information around nutrition and menus, automates various tasks, and gives you all the tools you need to make every meal something special for your customers.
Want to learn more? Start a conversation today to see how Culinary Digital can help you boost profits.
1https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8225138/
2https://hbswk.hbs.edu/archive/the-economics-of-e-loyalty
