Why your restaurant stock never matches — and how to find where it goes

Every restaurant owner knows the feeling: you bought 100 kg of chicken, the sales say you should have used 80, and the freezer has 12 left. Where did the other 8 kg go?

It almost never goes in one big obvious way. It leaks in small amounts, from five or six places at once. This guide lists them, and gives you a simple weekly routine to find which one is yours.

First: ideal usage versus actual usage

You cannot find a leak until you can measure it. Two figures do that:

• Ideal usage — what the dishes you sold should have consumed, according to their recipes. Sold 400 chicken burgers at 120 g each? Ideal usage is 48 kg.
• Actual usage — what really left the shelf: opening stock + purchases − closing stock.

Variance = actual − ideal. Positive variance is stock that went somewhere without being sold. Measured per item, it points straight at the problem.

(If you have not worked out food cost before, start with how to calculate food cost percentage.)

Where the stock really goes

1. Portions

The recipe says 120 g; the cook grabs a handful. Ten extra grams on every burger is 4 kg a month on 400 burgers. Portion control — scoops, scales, pre-weighed bags — is usually the biggest single fix.

2. Wastage nobody writes down

Burnt orders, dropped plates, food past its date, the trimmings off a whole chicken. Wastage is normal; unrecorded wastage is what makes stock vanish. If it is written off with a reason, it is a known cost. If it is not, it looks like theft.

3. The recipe is wrong

Sometimes the kitchen is right and the paper is wrong. If the recipe forgets the 10% trimmed off raw meat, or the oil in the fryer, every single sale under-counts what it used. Check a recipe by making the dish and weighing.

4. Purchase mistakes

The bill said 20 kg; the van brought 18. Or the delivery was entered twice. Count and weigh what arrives before you sign for it, and record it the day it arrives.

5. Transfers between branches

Stock sent from one branch to another that nobody receives sits on neither shelf. If the receiving branch never books it in, the sender looks fine and the receiver looks short — or the other way round. Every transfer should be received, and a short receipt should say what went missing.

6. Free food

Staff meals, food given to the owner's guests, complimentary dishes. All of it consumes stock. Ring it through the POS as a staff meal or a write-off, so it is counted.

7. Theft

It does happen, but treat it as the last explanation, not the first. Once portions, wastage, recipes, purchases and transfers are under control, what is left is much smaller and much easier to see.

A weekly routine that works

1. Count the expensive items weekly. You do not need to count everything — meat, cheese, oil and anything dear. Twenty items cover most of the money.
2. Compare counted against expected, item by item.
3. Look at the three biggest gaps in rupees, not in quantity. A kilo of saffron matters more than a kilo of onions.
4. Ask the questions in the order above — portions, wastage, recipe, purchases, transfers, free food — before you suspect anybody.
5. Record what you find. Write off real wastage with a reason. Fix a wrong recipe. Next week's gap should be smaller.

Doing it in your POS

All of this needs three things to be connected: recipes, stock and sales. When they live in three different notebooks, the routine takes a day. When the POS deducts each dish's recipe from the shelf as it is sold, the comparison is a report.

In Sellify, every sale takes its recipe off the branch's own shelf, write-offs are recorded with a reason, transfers are received with what actually arrived, and a stock count posts only the variance. The consumption comparison report then puts ideal, actual and the counted closing side by side, per item. See Sellify for restaurants or book a demo.