How To Ensure Your Dishes Are Turning A Profit

Creating great food isn’t just a matter of taste – for your business to be a success you need to understand how to transform your culinary creations into profit. This can sometimes be the most daunting aspect of running a food business and feeling that your lovingly crafted dishes are reduced to mere numbers can rankle a little. Research, and support from restaurant consultancy experts, can leave you free to create and be confident that your dishes will be turning a profit, as long as you are following these steps.

Understand The Cost Per Serving

The first step in building an effective restaurant profit calculator is to understand the precise cost per serving. Take your local breakfast cafe for example. The calculations would begin by breaking down the individual costs of each ingredient used in each meal. Take an average breakfast cafe’s sandwich, the ingredients could include:

• Two slices of sourdough – £0.50
• Two rashers of bacon – £0.54
• One egg, boiled and sliced – £0.34
• Three pieces of Batavia lettuce – £0.25
• One tomato, sliced – £0.50
• One teaspoon of garlic mayo or another condiment – £0.10

If you add these figures together, you can see the ingredients for a breakfast sandwich come to £2.23, which will form the basis of your pricing policy. On top of this, you will need to understand the costs of energy, colleagues, advertising, and maintenance to create an accurate picture of the restaurant food profit margin this breakfast sandwich will contribute to.

Keeping Track Of Data

To build an accurate picture, you need to keep a close eye on all of your incomings and outgoings. This means keeping watch on every receipt, each transaction through the POS system, as well as aspects like wage costs and energy bills. Having an accurate picture of all these elements means understanding the true cost. You are probably very aware of this but finding time to conduct these types of checks is challenging, although vital, especially if you’re a smaller business, which is why a restaurant profit calculator can be a real boon.

Decide Your Profit Margin

Once you understand the costs, you can decide your profit margin. For most hospitality businesses, this will sit at around 65-70% profit. You can work out your profit margin by taking the selling price from the total cost of each portion.

Carry Out Regular Cost Analysis

Once you establish the profit margin, you can look at how your pricing impacts sales as well as profit. If we go back to the local breakfast cafe, a decision to raise their prices to cover rising energy bills could mean that sales drop, making it hard for them to make any money until they can work out their finances. Other changes, such as changing the type of lettuce or finding a cheaper sourdough supplier may have a more positive impact on costs with no loss of sales.

Choose A Professional Restaurant Consultancy

Choosing to use a restaurant profit calculator such as the one honed by The Engine Room can take the guesswork out of this process. We are a specialist restaurant consultants with excellent skills in restaurant food profit management. Our support goes beyond a ‘mature’ check-in for reactive needs and can hug a business providing confidence from a whole commercial team without the price tag and convolution of employing one. Contact our team for more information.
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