Five Easy Steps to Controlling Your Restaurant’s COGS

Calculating your restaurant’s cost of goods sold can be as easy as these five simple steps:

Plan

Create a recipe for a tasty dish. Without a recipe, you will have inconsistent quality in your food and no way of knowing how much of each ingredient is used each time the dish is prepared.

Buy

Purchase the ingredients that you need to make the recipe. What you buy is the amount that you increase your inventory of ingredients.

Sell

Serve your tasty dish to your customers. Each time you sell the dish, your inventory of ingredients used should theoretically deplete by the quantity used in the recipe.

Count

Take inventory of what you have left in stock. What you actually have left on the shelves is the true value of what is left after use, regardless of how many of each item you sold.

Analyze

Review the results and find cost savings. What you should have used is in your perfect or ideal world use, which means the recipe was followed to the letter, nothing spilled, and nothing was burnt or…