How Can You Reduce Costs and Increase Your Restaurant Income?

How Can You Reduce Costs and Increase Your Restaurant Income?

The restaurant business is tough. Not only do you have to serve delicious food and provide a great atmosphere, you also have to make sure that your prices are attractive, your service is great, and that you’re making a profit. Dashy Dash realized how difficult it is for restaurants to survive so it set out to help manage supply cost.

By arming restaurants with transparent information about products, prices and suppliers, they can do more.  Imagine you can automatically catch rising prices before they get out of control or benchmark your supply cost against other prices shared by similar businesses.  These are all tools Dashy Dash has implemented in addition to giving you alternative suppliers so you can take action when you see changes and stay ahead of the game. 

It’s no secret that the margins in the restaurant business are slim. So how can you reduce costs and increase your restaurant income? In this blog post we will explore some tips and tricks on how to reduce costs in your restaurant so that you can increase your profits with the help of Dashy Dash. From menu engineering to cutting down on food waste, read on to learn more about how you can make your restaurant more profitable.

The Challenges

The formula for increasing profit is the same for every business. Increase your revenue, while reducing your costs. However, the best ways to pursue increased profits can be a little unique in the restaurant industry. Below are 5 tips for increasing revenue and decreasing costs in your restaurant.

Cost Control

The largest costs for restaurants are called “Prime Costs”, which consist of Labor and Cost of Goods Sold (COGS). COGS aren’t just food or beverage costs, they are any costs of physical items associated with preparing and serving a meal to a guest, so that includes paper goods like napkins or take-out containers as well.

Manage Labor - There are lots of ways to intelligently manage your labor costs. Analyze your operations and experiment with different staffing levels, or changes in the way you operate that could allow you to get the same work done with less labor. 

  • Are you overstaffed during certain shifts?
  • Are there ways to stream-line certain work in the kitchen? Or eliminate certain menu items that are very laborious, but not critical. 
  • Are you paying staff to do low value tasks like taking inventory once a week when once a month will do?

Cut Food Waste - Food waste can show up in your operation in many forms, closely managing food waste is a great way to instantly increase the amount of dollars that reach your bottom line. Here are some places to look for food waste.

  • Portion sizes that are over spec. If your recipes call for ¼ lbs of ground beef per patty, but some of your cooks are making ⅓ lbs patties, you’ll be spending 30% more on ground beef than you intended.
  • Food on the floor. Take over the job of cleaning the kitchen during or after a shift. Check how much food hit the floor, or had to be thrown out. You might be shocked.
  • Manage spoilage. It can be tempting to save by purchasing larger bulk packaging, but if you’re throwing out a lot of unused produce, you should be calculating if you are really saving anything at all.

Analyze, manage, and benchmark your supply prices and costs - Are you getting the best prices on the supplies you buy most often? Everyone thinks they do a good job negotiating prices, but distributors often make it very difficult to compare prices across vendors.

  • Dashy Dash is a great tool for quickly understanding your supply expenses without very much effort at all. Simply upload images of your invoices to Dashy Dash and we’ll analyze all your expenses at the line-item level and deliver automated savings insights like a categorized break-down of spend, and which items have changed prices from the last time you purchased.

As you can see there are some creative ways to look at your cost control and identify areas where you can improve.  Dashy Dash can also provide the edge you need to stay competitive so you can reduce costs by comparing supply costs across multiple vendors and increase income.  If you apply some of these tools and tips then you are on your way to improve your bottom line and increase your profits.

Revenue Growth

Test price increases -  No one likes price increases, but you won’t be doing your customers any favors if you go out of business. When your supply prices increase, test your ability to raise prices on menu items to off-set your increased costs.

Drive traffic on slower days - You might always be at capacity during prime-time on Friday and Saturday nights, but you can drive more turns on lower traffic days by offering discounts or promotions. Any incremental revenue on slower days can help offset your labor costs, so it can be beneficial to drive in incremental diners, even if not all of them are paying full price.

Conclusion

There are many ways to reduce costs and increase income in your restaurant. By carefully managing your inventory, using technology like Dashy Dash to your advantage, and offering discounts and promotions, you can boost your bottom line.

About Dashy Dash

Dashy Dash helps restaurants, restaurant groups, and chains of all types control supply costs with less work.

With Dashy Dash restaurants can manage invoices, track product price histories, and drill down into expense categories. We help restaurants...

  • Automatically catch rising prices before they spin out of control
  • Benchmark prices for supplies against those paid by similar restaurants and bars
  • Easily find alternative products and suppliers in their area
  • Capture credits by automatically auditing invoices for errors

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