Restaurant Recipe Management: How to Improve Operations and Reduce Costs

Consistency is key in the restaurant industry. If today you create the perfect crispy pizza, but tomorrow you produce one with a soggy bottom, client satisfaction will drop, and you will lose customers.

That’s why restaurant recipe management is important. It helps you make delicious dishes every time, optimize your inventory, and keep costs at a minimum.

In this article, you will find valuable tips on how to manage your restaurant’s recipes to ensure your clients are always happy with your food.

What is recipe management?

Recipe management is the process of creating, optimizing, and executing the recipes that you use at your restaurant. It includes measuring ingredients, controlling portions, and costing a recipe to ensure you get a standardized product that leads your business to profit.

It can be done in two main ways:

• Manually: it is the cheapest option, but it involves more work. You will have to cost each recipe by hand and have printed recipe portions in the kitchen to ensure compliance;
• Using a restaurant recipe management software: this is a more expensive option but it can help you automate the process if you don’t have the time to spend tracking all the recipe operations.

What are the benefits of restaurant recipe management?

Spending time on restaurant recipe management is beneficial both for you and your clients because of:

• Cost optimization: You can adjust ingredients and quantities to create delicious recipes that are high-profit;
• Less food waste: Ideally, you should use an ingredient in more than one recipe and use all parts of an ingredient, so there is little to throw away. This way, you produce a small amount of food waste that doesn’t affect your budget and the environment;
• Easy to scale: If you plan to expand your business to another location or even just online, it will be easier to make a correct approximation for cost and inventory when you know exactly what and how many ingredients go into each dish;
• Smoother kitchen tasks: With clear cooking processes, the kitchen staff can focus on preparing dishes faster and more accurately, decreasing the risk of mistakes;
• Better inventory management: When you know exactly how much of an ingredient is used for a dish, you can make a good estimation for the best time to restock;
• Reliable food quality: if a client gets a satisfactory meal every time, they are more likely to come back and promote your business to their friends, family, and online through positive reviews.

6 tips for managing your restaurant’s recipes

No matter if you choose to do restaurant recipe management manually or use software, these tips will help you ace it:

1. Create standardized recipes

How can you know your food costs if you don’t know how much you spend on preparing a specific dish? Moreover, if the cost of preparation varies each time you cook the dish, you won’t be able to create an accurate financial statement.

Therefore, creating a standardized recipe for all your menu items is a must. Start by:

• Listing all ingredients necessary for a dish;
• Measure the necessary quantity for each one;
• Calculate the cost of each ingredient to get the final cost of the recipe.

2. Use the same ingredient for different dishes

Restaurant kitchens tend to produce a lot of food waste, which ends up eating into their profit. For example, if you buy a whole animal but only use a part of it, you lose money.

Try a more nose-to-tail approach to your recipe creation so you can use up all parts of your ingredients and waste very little. This will not only help you lower costs but also provoke you to be more creative and impress your clients with unique dishes.

3. Update recipes to keep costs low

Ingredient prices can change quite often, and a dish that once was profitable can become too expensive to produce. Don’t limit yourself, and give yourself the liberty to change up your recipes when they no longer work for you.

Consider adopting a seasonal menu or just some seasonal menu items, as ingredients that are in season tend to be cheaper. You can also create excitement around new dishes and motivate clients to make a reservation to give them a try.

4. Monitor bestselling menu items

The key to great restaurant recipe management is to listen to your clients’ input. You may believe you have created the perfect cost-efficient and delicious menu item, but if nobody orders it, your profit will suffer.

Thus, to cater to your target audience, you need to know what dishes they usually prefer and which they ignore. You can do this easily if you use the GloriaFood POS system, which has a powerful analytics module where you can see how often a product is ordered, your star menu categories, and much more.

If you also want to monitor your online sales, the Reports module from GloriaFood gives you access to valuable online restaurant data such as bestselling dishes, most-liked promotions, and even the delivery zones where most of your orders come from.

5. Create protocols for allergy-safe dishes

There is a rising number of people who suffer from food allergies but would still like to enjoy eating out. If you want to attract them to your restaurant, you must:

• Adapt or create new recipes that are allergy-safe;
• Assign a space in the kitchen for the preparation of the allergy-safe menu items;
• Create protocols for employees to ensure the food is prepared safely;
• Mention the allergens in each menu item and signal the safe dishes. You can do so easily with the online menu builder from GloriaFood. You can also update it as many times as you want, free of charge.

Read more: How to Improve Your Menu with Allergen Information & Keep Customers Safe

6. Train your staff

Creating standardized recipes and standard operating procedures for your restaurant is the first step, but you must ensure your employees can follow them.

Consequently, you should organize trainings where you teach staff how to prepare standardized recipes, how to respect allergy protocols, and any other issue where you notice employees struggling.

You could also have a senior member monitoring them for a while to ensure everything is prepared accordingly.

Final words

Restaurant recipe management is a must for any business owner who wants to keep costs low and food quality high. As long as you provide clients with consistently good food and a great experience, they will keep coming back and spending money at your place.