Available in: Agile | Aware | Analyzer | Multi-Outlet
Waste tracking involves carefully recording various waste events in a busy kitchen. These include food spoilage, complimentary meals, dropped items, necessary refires, and fresh bread discarded at the end of dinner service. Each entry highlights the story of waste we aim to reduce in our quest for efficiency and sustainability.
Why it's important
Tracking spoilage and waste in the kitchen is important for several reasons:
- Cost Efficiency: By monitoring spoilage, you can identify which ingredients are consistently going to waste. This can help you adjust your purchasing habits, reducing unnecessary expenditures on items that may not be used in time.
- Food Safety: Tracking waste helps ensure food is stored and used properly, minimizing the risk of foodborne illnesses. It also aids in maintaining proper stock rotation, following the "first in, first out" principle.
- Sustainability: Reducing food waste contributes to a more sustainable kitchen operation. By identifying areas of excess or mismanagement, you can implement better practices, ultimately minimizing your environmental impact.
- Inventory Management: Tracking spoilage helps improve inventory control. By understanding which items spoil quickly or aren’t used, you can adjust your inventory levels, leading to more effective operations.
- Menu Planning: Monitoring waste can influence menu design by highlighting dishes that are less popular or have components that spoil quickly. This allows you to create meals that better align with customers' needs.
- Staff Training and Accountability: Recording waste can facilitate discussions of best practices with kitchen staff, leading to better training and accountability in how food is handled and prepared. Overall, tracking spoilage and waste enhances a kitchen's operational efficiency and promotes accountability and sustainability.
Without tracking waste, sources of known loss will be included in the variance report (the difference between your ideal and actual food cost), making it difficult to isolate and identify sources of unknown loss, like theft, over-portioning, incorrect prep, or improper storage.
How to use it
1) Click on the Hamburger menu in the top left corner
2) Expand the Manage Inventory dropdown
3) Click Waste
4) Create Waste Type
Create Types of waste you have by clicking the Types button:
5) Click the + New button to add names of waste type
6) Create names and Save
7) Entering Waste
8) Waste tracking manager
Use the waste tracking journal to view your aggregated waste records in one place.
Click Tools > Waste Tracking Journal.
The Big Picture
Waste is considered an adjustment to the Ideal Food Cost.
Variance is calculated as:
Actual Food Cost - (Ideal Food Cost - Waste) = Variance
- Your kitchen crew should track waste in real-time, but it can be entered into reciProfity in batches at the same intervals that you enter counts and prep builds.
- Attached is a sample spreadsheet file to print and use for waste tracking.