15 May How to reduce inventory in your restaurant?

In this post we want to show how to reduce your inventory at your restaurant.

I told you the story of the overstocked restaurant in my previous blog post. Often when I start working with a new client, I see that they have enough stock to sell for up to 4 weeks without making any purchases. And even so, the team continues to order. As a result, they end up having issues such as theft, wastage, breakage and others.

This usually happens when no one is in charge of stock control and several people place orders. So nobody is held accountable.

So how can we reduce our stock level?

1) Start tracking. The most fundamental thing is to monitor the amount of product we are holding and translate it into money. What is not measured cannot be improved, so we have to know where we are each week.

2) Know your PAR levels (Periodic Automatic Replenishment). PAR levels would help us understand the amount of stock that we must have at all times, which is a certain amount for each product. This has a direct relationship with the sales we have of each product and its usual demand. For example, our PAR level can be 468 bottles of Coca-Cola Zero and 23 bottles of Ginger Beer, since the demand for cola is much higher than for ginger beer. By knowing the PAR number, we will know how much product we should order from the supplier in order to cover sales. It’s necessary to include a little extra so we don’t run out of product.

3) Eliminate blind ordering, which means ordering without checking what we have on our shelves.

4) Schedule orders by days of the week, this will help you have greater control of the quantities to be ordered each time and will help you to be more clear about your PAR levels.

5) Schedule your purchases based on your sales forecast. Look at the weather, upcoming sporting events, bank holiday weekends, or special occasions like Valentine’s Day.

6) Do not buy offers, buy what you need. We have all received that call from suppliers saying that they have 3 boxes of something and that they would give it to us at a price deal. Often, they are really calling you because they need to give that stock away before it goes to waste. Let it be their waste, not yours!

Here is a video showing how to do inventory. We hope you find it useful.

You can buy the stock take template here:

RECOMMENDED READ: Why is it important to have a reduced inventory at your restaurnt