I have done about 100 food inventory audits and have figured out how to count food precisely and fast. This is accomplished with a mix of technology, good counting habits, and having a strategy in place for new items, yield,s and prepped items (this is when items are combined together). Without these strategies, it is very easy for a food inventory to take several hours and lead to inefficiencies where none needed to be if one were better prepared. Food inventory does not need to take a ton of time. When properly equipped, food inventory can be done in reasonable time and actually be quite enjoyable.
If you have struggled to put together a report for your food inventory, here are some tips to help you with common problems:
1. Weights are the most precise way to count anything
I weigh all food inventory on a scale to calculate how much of it is there. Most food inventory is counted by “tenthing,” which as you all know, is an eyeball estimate like “0.5 of a box” or “0.2 of a carton.” But this is problematic to me for two reasons:
Reason #1: It’s not precise. Estimating is unacceptable if one prioritizes accuracy.
Reason #2: The “tenth” requires interpretation on the part of the counter, which leads to mistakes. For example, someone that estimates that 0.5 box of tomatoes is in stock also must make it clear what size the box of tomatoes is—15 lb, 20 lb, or 25 lb? What happens if you switch suppliers constantly and you have both 15 lb boxes and 25 lb boxes on hand? What happens if you find two tomatoes just sitting in a bowl? Do you count those 2 tomatoes relative to the 15 lb unit it was shipped in? What happens if we have chopped tomatoes on the kitchen line that were used for nachos? Does the counter try to estimate what the equivalent would be in a full box of tomatoes?
These questions overcomplicate the counting process and are easily resolved by weighing everything.
This issue of interpreting the unit size can also be a problem if items are shipped as packages within a case. For example, if cheese is sent out as 2-by-2.5 kg case, and you count 0.5 units, is that 0.5 case? Or is that 0.5 of a 2.5 kg bag? There is too much guesswork with this method, and it is not adaptable to the conditions that a kitchen operates in. I have done food inventories for people where over four weeks, they will buy shredded nacho cheese packages that are in 2.5 kg bags, 1.5 kg bags, and 3 kg bags. All of this causes unnecessary confusion that again, is solved by weighing everything.
These are the main reasons I discourage the use of tenthing, no matter how much “speed” people believe it may add to the process. I may also add as a final retort to tenthing that when I use the technology to count, I can weigh items faster than a person can tenth. So there is no legitimacy to the use of tenthing to speed up counting.
As a final note, I do not weigh items that are sealed in their containers. Those are counted as full units equivalent to the capacity stated on the label, like how full bottles of liquor are not weighed during the beverage inventory control process. I just scan the barcode on the sealed item, and the system knows the capacity of it based on what has been programmed into the item database. This takes all the interpretation out of counting full units and makes counting faster.
2. Use Technology to Accelerate Data Input
Technology is a must for counting food efficiently. When I am counting food, all the data is entered into an app on my iPhone. When weighing items, weights are transmitted directly from my scale to my app via bluetooth. When transferring data from the phone to the auditing software, the data is transmitted directly into my cloud-based counting software. This setup replaces pen and paper for the count (by using the app), subjective judgement from tenthing (by using precise weights transmitted directly from the scale), and eliminates data entry errors when converting pen and paper to spreadsheet (by transmitting the data directly to the cloud-based software).
This configuration saves time due to the lack of manual processes involved in a traditional inventory where people are writing notes on a pad of paper, and then transferring all that information item by item into a spreadsheet or online auditing platform. If you are serious about counting food accurately and within a reasonable time frame, technology is required.
3. Use Technology to Accurately Calculate Costs
Once my counts are entered, the value of the inventory is determined by what the business pays for everything on the invoices. Every item must have their cost / unit entered from the invoices, to determine what the value of everything is. I use specialized software to do this, with an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software that reads invoices, extracts the text from the document as well as the quantities ordered and the amounts paid, and uses that information to automatically apply pricing information to all the items.
Since I have a highly intelligent robot calculating and updating prices, I do not have to go through every item line by line and manually input or update prices. This practice of entering in purchases line-by-line from the invoice into an Excel spreadsheet is something I did many years ago when I was doing inventory manually. I did not enjoy entering food invoices manually. Food invoices have several different units for both liquid and solids like lb, kg, oz, unit, ml, and L that require you to stop and make sure you have it entered correctly.
Today, the tools I use to record, transmit, and extract data from documents like invoices enables me to do inventory much faster with much greater accuracy.
4. Use technology that is tied into your invoices to create your recipe costing
Every kitchen has a recipe book with a rough estimate of the costs that are involved for all the items going into each menu item. But the problem with this is the information is usually in a format (paper or spreadsheet) that is not updating the costs extracted from the most current invoices. The costs are typically calculated by hand by the chef, at the time he is creating the recipe book, and then it is not updated again.
I use software that I program the recipes for every button on the POS, and the items in the recipes are tied to the costs extracted from each invoice I input using the OCR. All those little changes are done automatically, so this enables me to pull up accurate recipe information very quickly. In fact, every time I do a food inventory, the food costing report that also gets sent out is as current as it can possibly be, eliminating any concerns the operator may have about cost fluctuations that can sometimes occur daily. To create accurate, up-to-date recipe costing, technology that is tied to the invoices and automatically updates every recipe affected by price changes is very important.
Kevin Tam is a Sculpture Hospitality franchisee with more than a decade of experience working directly with bar, restaurant, and nightclub owners on all points of the spectrum. From family-owned single bar operations to large companies with locations on an international scale, Kevin works with them all and understands the unique challenges each kind of company faces. He’s also the author of a book titled Night Club Marketing Systems – How to Get Customers for Your Bar, a regular writer/contributor for Bar & Restaurant.
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