3 levers to optimize your food cost in the face of inflation

Brice Konda, co-founder of Inpulse, the platform that is revolutionising stock management and supplier orders thanks to artificial intelligence, shares his advice for optimising your food costs. The objective: to regain margin points without increasing prices, which could have a direct impact on your store's traffic.

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#1 - Focus on menu engineering

Volatility is such that some restaurateurs change prices once or twice a week on dozens of references. In addition to the need to change price lists quickly to replace missing or expensive references, we must continue to control our material ratios and quickly identify where we are losing margin.

In the short term, it is about being agile while maintaining control of your profitability through what is known as "menu engineering". Making informed choices to revise or adjust recipes, determining the most profitable and popular dishes to promote or substitute for others.

In thelong term, for restaurant chains, it is a question of preparing for centralised purchasing negotiations, which may prove to be complicated. We are in a particular context where the prices negotiated by the centrals are no longer respected. The quality and simplified access to the network's purchasing data can make the difference in the next exchanges with suppliers.

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#2 - Anticipating disruptions and avoiding losses: relying on data, not intuition, in times of economic contraction

Placing the right supplier orders is far from easy and yet many players continue to do it by intuition. We have developed Inpulse to meet three challenges: to forecast future sales as accurately as possible, to order just what is needed, and to access all the performance indicators in real time (necessary in the field and at headquarters to control food costs). The key word? Precision.

By automating the material value chain, costly mistakes can be avoided. To order the right quantity, you have to take into account all the parameters: forecasts, recipes, stock levels, shelf life and conditions of each supplier. This is our core business: using artificial intelligence to accurately forecast future sales and combining all these factors to ensure efficient just-in-time supply.

Today, some catering professionals, who have sufficient storage capacity, use Inpulse by adding additional quantities to the tool's recommendations in order to manage a buffer stock of raw materials that they consider to be at risk. This allows them to continue to anticipate shortages and limit losses by reaching an optimal stock level given the current situation.

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#3 - Measure performance in real time to react immediately

The centralisation of data is essential to allow decision-makers to focus on analysis and to effectively manage the performance of their network.

There are two key performance indicators that should be monitored regularly to quickly identify margin losses: food cost and its evolution, and the analysis of the differences between actual and theoretical consumption.

In order to effectively monitor food costs, regular inventory feedback should be implemented. We recommend that a partial inventory be taken every week on particularly expensive products to identify over-consumption of raw materials. These inventory reports, coupled with real-time stock movements, allow for a detailed analysis of losses, a visualization of discrepancies and the detection of anomalies directly at the source.

Then, with the teams, define the standards to be respected and encourage the operational staff in the field to be more rigorous in reporting losses. You will then be able to reduce these anomalies which have a strong impact on the margin day after day. Is it an overdose? Are they unreported losses? Access to the history of all sales and stock data allows you to compare, over time, the evolution of losses and to suggest improvements.

Let's take the example of non-compliance with technical specifications. When a cook has been on the job for a long time, you can rely on his or her experience, but when you're growing, you need to get your teams onboard quickly and be able to rectify the situation within the first few weeks. Even more so when salmon can increase by 22% in a month, and the loss of earnings from a 3g consumption difference per sushi represents 261 euros on a thousand platters... Over an entire network, you can quickly see the impact on food cost !

If inflation becomes structural, as some experts fear, this is the time to prepare for future challenges with data.

During the last webinar I hosted with channel founders, we talked about these issues of overconsumption and their impact on the margin, here is an excerpt below. For see the full replay, it's here.

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Inpulse supports restaurant chains, food kiosks themed, bakeries and dark kitchens in optimizing their food cost. Our customers gain up to 5 margin points after just a few months of use. Request an appointment appointment with an expert to find out what Inpulse can do for you.