Although many restaurants do not take it into account, about 10 percent of food is wasted before it becomes a dish, becoming a sunk cost and an obstacle to increasing business profitability.

This is known as wastage, and in this article we have compiled the most common types, as well as six ways to minimize them with the help of Soft Restaurant®, a development specially designed to optimize the management of restaurants and gastronomic businesses. Keep reading!

What types of waste are generated in a restaurant?

Essentially, the "waste" is the loss of inputs used as a result of food preparation. However, this loss can occur at different stages of the operation, the most important being:

During the purchase of supplies

Purchases are a fundamental moment in the management of restaurants, since in this process there may be the risk of making bad decisions that end up leading to the purchase of excess products, the acquisition of poor quality products or the choice of a means of transport that ends up damaging the products during the journey to the warehouse.

Storage loss

An essential task is to review the merchandise in detail from the moment it is received to verify that everything is in good condition. 

Keep in mind that most of the products used in the preparation of a dish are perishable and some require specific temperature and space conditions, so you must have optimized storage spaces for their protection.

During preparation

When cooks are preparing the dishes of the day, errors can occur that contribute to the generation of waste, from errors in the defrosting or cooking process to improper handling that generates the loss of the product.

Leftover food

The inadequate calculation of the portions for each dish, the excessive production of products and the lack of an adequate sales strategy to promote the various products that are part of the menu can lead to waste in the form of excess food, so it is important that you work in these three areas to avoid product waste.

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How can you reduce shrink losses with Soft Restaurant®?

Learning to manage shrinkage is a fundamental task to reduce costs in a restaurant business, but it involves a set of activities and processes that require a comprehensive system that helps to carry them out in a practical and organized way.

Therefore, Soft Restaurant® has ideal functions to maintain control in the key stages of waste generation, such as:

1. Shopping

Soft Restaurant® allows you to register your purchases by assigning the supplier and the cost of the presentations, as well as important data such as the date of receipt and the person who will receive the purchase, which is ideal to carry a better control when receiving your products and verify that its quality is adequate.

In addition, with each purchase that is made, the income is automatically recorded in your warehouse stock, facilitating the control of all your supplies.

2. Stock minimal and stock maximum

This development restaurateur allows you to assign the stocks minimum that you must maintain per product and activate an alert that will inform you if a product is about to end during the operation, which will guarantee that you will never run out of supply.

On the other hand, it also allows you to assign the stock maximum input for avoid overexistence that you cannot handle correctly and generate the loss due to bad storage or expiration.

In addition, the system allows you to generate your purchase orders based on the stocks minimums and maximums, helping you acquire the supplies that your dishes require at the right time.

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3. Recipe standardization

With Soft Restaurant® You can register your recipes with the supplies and the exact quantities with which the product is made, which will be discounted in the inventory record when making the transaction.

In the same way, it allows you to add comments on the way the product is prepared, with which you can make sure that, regardless of the cook or person in charge of the area, recipes will always be made in the same way and careless waste during the preparation process will be avoided.

4. Physical inventory

The physical inventory function allows you to capture the physical inventory of your warehouses and adjust the system to the actual inventory, allowing you keep a real control on your raw materials and detect if they are in unsuitable conditions in time to prevent them from decomposing.

It may interest you: How to keep inventory control in a restaurant?

5. Waste in warehouse

When you have processed inputs that tend to decompose, the waste function allows you to remove them from the system and record the movement out of the warehouse. 

This process can be used when for some reason you have to throw away a ready-made sales product, helping you to detect if it is necessary to improve control to avoid excess waste.

6. Product explosion

Many businesses offer services for events such as banquets or reservations for large numbers of people, which can lead to overproduction or improper handling of garnishes and waste of leftover food.

For this, Soft Restaurant® has the product explosion function, which allows you to create a list of products for this type of service and determine exactly how many inputs would you use to prepare the desired quantity of products, helping you to have better control in purchases and production to avoid waste.

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Start reducing waste costs in your business with Soft Restaurant®!

These are just some of the functions that Soft Restaurant® has to help you reduce the waste in your business, but in reality this system is equipped with multiple tools that will help you to carry out a comprehensive management of all the resources that are necessary for an efficient and profitable operation.

If you would like to know all the details, we invite you to receive a personalized advice with one of our executives by clicking here below and start to obtain the maximum profits in your business!