What are the challenges of growing from 2 to 10 restaurants? Duplicating your concept and expanding your network is an opportunity to achieve economies of scale and improve margins through better inventory management. Here are 8 key points to help you focus your energy in the right place.
Eloi du Peyroux
13
May 2025
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Growing from 2 to 10 restaurants radically transforms stock management challenges. This growth exposes weaknesses that went unnoticed with a single establishment: unpredictable stock-outs, uncontrolled food waste, poor coordination with suppliers.
In the foodservice sector, raw material costs account for 25 to 35% of sales. Poor inventory management can significantly reduce your bottom line. Conversely, optimizing this item can generate substantial gains in your operating margin.
Inventory management in multi-site catering requires a structured approach and the right tools. Here are 8 proven strategies for controlling costs while maintaining service quality.
The multiplication of stores exponentially amplifies inventory management problems. The main difficulties identified are :
Critical stock-outs: inexperienced teams underestimate requirements, resulting in stock-outs that have a direct impact on customer service and brand image.
Explosion of food waste: without volume control, excessive orders for perishable products generate significant financial losses.
Logistics complexity: coordination between multiple stores, suppliers and delivery schedules becomes unmanageable without a centralized system.
Loss of financial control: billing errors and price discrepancies multiply, making accurate costing impossible.
As volumes increase, so do the problems. A methodical approach to inventory management is essential.
Here are the 8 key points for putting your energy in the right place:
Objective: Maximize economies of scale through negotiated contracts
Consolidating purchases via a central source significantly increases your negotiating power. This centralization enables you to go from unit orders of 10 kg to consolidated volumes of 100 kg per week, transforming your position vis-à-vis suppliers.
Consolidated analysis reveals imbalances: restaurants over-ordering perishable ingredients, missed opportunities on more economical packaging, variations in quality between establishments. Accurately map your needs before negotiating. Analyze your technical data sheetsyour volumes by food category and your optimal delivery frequencies.
Then formalize them with supply contracts contracts. This approach typically generates 5 to 15% savings on raw materials purchases.
Objective: Avoid any emergency orders to respect the volumes negotiated with selected suppliers and maintain quality in your restaurants.
Emergency orders at 2pm to make up for stock shortages cost on average 25% more than negotiated rates. These recurring situations destroy margins and compromise quality.
Rely on an inventory management tool like Inpulse enables you to centralize all your suppliers in one place, anticipate supply needs, order easily and monitor stock levels in real time. In this way, you can remotely control supplies to each of your restaurants.
This centralization guarantees compliance with negotiated volumes and eliminates quality variations between your establishments. Integration with your restaurant cash register automates sales tracking and optimizes replenishment.
"With Inpulse, everything is integrated into a single piece of software, which saves us an incredible amount of time and enables us to monitor our stocks. It's a tool that has enormously facilitated our inventory, ordering and purchasing management processes." Benjamin Attal, co-founder of Franks Hot Dog. See the full case study.
Objective: Standardise production to control quality and cut costs.
Tired of your burgers tasting different in different restaurants? The solution is central kitchen. This production laboratory enables you to standardize your recipes, culinary techniques and team training. This standardization of production ensures precise cost control and consistent quality.
This facilitates rapid adaptation to market trends. Recipe changes can be applied instantly across the entire network, with no additional training required for local teams. This guarantees product consistency, consistent quality and reduced preparation costs.
The result: consistent quality, more efficient staff, savings on ingredients, simplified inventory management, and therefore reduced food waste.
This organization also simplifies your food stock management. Instead of managing 50 ingredients per restaurant, you only have to keep track of 15 semi-finished products.
Objective: Avoid ordering errors that lead to food waste, stock-outs and unnecessary cash flow... and eat into your margins on a massive scale.
How many times have you had too many salads end up in the garbage can on a Monday, then nothing left for the Friday rush? Order errors are the bane of growing chains.
Order errors generate two types of loss: wastage due to over-ordering, and loss of sales due to breakage. Artificial intelligence reduces these malfunctions.
Inpulse's artificial intelligence technology predicts future sales and automatically generates supplier orders to ensure that you have just the right amount in stock. Our algorithms analyze sales histories, integrate external variables (weather, school vacations, local events) and calculate optimal requirements. This automated prediction adjusts orders according to actual conditions. Inpulse enables restaurateurs to order what they need at the right time.
The AI detects, for example, that a rainy period increases demand for soups by 30% and reduces demand for salads by 20%. Orders adjust automatically, minimizing waste and stock-outs. With no previous catering experience, your new managers achieve their food cost objectives within the first few months. No more stress of miscalibrated orders and unbalanced stock levels.
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Objective: Avoid material cost drifts that eat into your margins
Uncontrolled portion variations destroy profitability. An excess of 15g of cheese per pizza represents 30% less margin on this item. Portion control equipment (scales, graduated ladles, precise dosers) standardizes preparations. Portioned protein packaging on receipt eliminates approximations.
Training and tools are the first step, then it's up to you to check compliance with the technical data sheets on a regular basis. Inpulse enables you to analyze the yield variances of each facility, to check the difference between theoretical and actual consumption of raw materials, which has a direct impact on your food cost. For example, if the theoretical consumption of grated cheese is 50g per pizza and the actual use is 65g, that's 30% less margin! The automatic alert system enables immediate correction.
Objective: Get the right information from the field, for effective management.
Rigorous monitoring procedures are essential for efficient inventory management, as they limit errors and provide essential data for stock analysis. Once you've duplicated your concept and know-how, it's time to do the same with good stock management practices, by standardizing operations in your restaurants.
Three reference management steps are particularly important:
This operational rigor makes it possible to accurately calculate stock turnover rates and optimize replenishment policies. Without clear procedures, each restaurant does things differently.
The result? Impossible to compare your performance or identify best practices to duplicate.
Objective: Make decisions based on objective data
Too many restaurateurs navigate by sight. They discover their stock problems at the end of the month, when it's too late to act. You need to manage in real time!
Real-time management replaces reactive management. With software like Inpulse, you can collect and analyze two types of data:
Supply metrics :
Profitability indicators :
In this way, you can identify optimization opportunities, detect problems and act quickly. Inpulse's artificial intelligence enables you to make informed decisions, not only to improve your internal procedures, but also to manage your promotions or technical data sheets, while controlling the margins generated.
Objective : Make employees aware of inventory management and turn them into performance players.
Effective inventory management requires the involvement of all staff. Raising employee awareness of the restaurant's objectives is greatly facilitated by the sharing of performance indicators. This enables employees to measure the impact of their actions and to become actively involved in improving operational management.
To achieve this goal, it's crucial to be transparent, making the company's ratios and financial targets available. Some entrepreneurs even go so far as to offer performance bonuses. This system motivates restaurant staff, encouraging them to redouble their efforts and invest more in their respective missions.
Share your objectives: Explain that limiting food waste to 3% instead of 8% means €2,000 extra margin per month. Suddenly, your teams understand why you insist on respecting portion sizes, and this makes them take responsibility for their behavior.
Regular technical training: organizing storage areas, reading expiration dates and using management tools. These skills directly reduce costly errors.
Reward good results: Some restaurateurs offer bonuses when the team meets food cost targets. This method works: when your employees are interested in results, they become more vigilant.
The snowball effect: well-trained managers pass on their best practices. They become ambassadors for your method, and in turn train new arrivals.
"Equipping ourselves with tools like Inpulse helps raise team awareness. We do this with bonuses that are released for the entire staff if profitability targets are met." Valentin Bauer, Founder of Tripletta pizzerias
At Inpulse, we've designed a tool dedicated to fast-growing chain stores , enabling them to automate their inventory management operations. It's the first artificial intelligence solution built for restaurant chains, creating a virtuous circle between the field and head office by simplifying operations and centralizing key performance indicators.
To see the full range of Inpulse features, contact us. We'll be happy to provide you with a demonstration of our tool, adapted to your concept and your specific management requirements.
Inpulse equips more than 3,500 restaurants, bakeries and themed food kiosks . discover here our customers' testimonials.
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