Food inventory is shipped in several different kinds of units. There are weights, there are volumes, and there are units.
Weights are for solids and are typically displayed in pounds or kilograms. Volumes are for liquids and are often displayed in milliliters or liters. Units are usually for vegetables like avocados and heads of lettuce, which cannot be sold in exact weights or volumes.
When you are building a food inventory control system, items are going to be billed in different units, and therefore must be inventoried in different units. This can lead to various pains in the quest to produce accurate numbers. Do you count everything in the same units? Or do you have to constantly toggle your scale between units as you do your counts? Also, on the reporting end, do you express your cost with different cost per unit measurements like $/oz, $/lb, or $/L?
These questions plague all operators that attempt to tackle the problem of units when building a food inventory. In this article, I will give some helpful tips on how to approach these problems.
Stop the Chaos, and Choose ONE Unit to Convert All Measurements
I personally express all inventory as an ounce, which is basically a 30 gram increment. I only weigh items in grams or kilograms. I use grams for small things and kilograms for bigger things. My auditing platform, Measuring Cup, takes all the weights and converts them to my desired units of ounces on the reporting side.
Keeping all the units in ounces gives me the ability to look at cost per ounce of any category of inventory, and know exactly where changes will make the biggest impact to the bottom line.
If costs are expressed in different units across the entire inventory report, you have to do math in your head every time you look at an inventory item with different units, and that is just silly.
I also prefer the ounce as my primary unit because it is a commonly used unit by chef’s for portioning. This additionally helps operators detect the impact of things like small tweaks to portioning that make big differences but are difficult to detect with the larger units like pounds or kilograms.
The last reason why I prefer the ounce is it has good carry over between liquids and solids. A dry ounce is 30 grams, and an ounce of liquid in most measuring cups is 30 ml. And most liquids in the kitchen will be 1 gram per ml. So because they are basically the same, you can express the entire inventory as either a liquid ounce or dry ounce, and it is much easier to read. So while you can choose whatever unit you want, it’s wise to stick with one, and my vote is for the ounce.
How to Count Items Shipped in Units
For items that are shipped in units, I will convert it to a weighted item. This is accomplished by taking a weight of three or four typical units, and then converting each “unit” to the average weight observed.
For example, I have found heads of iceberg lettuce to be approximately 600 grams, and when it is shipped in a box of six units, my system treats each box as 3600 grams, or 120 ounces. This gives me the ability to find a piece of iceberg lettuce and put it on the scale to get an accurate measurement.
However, with this method, the invoice, and therefore cost, may be off by small amounts for the differences in each head of lettuce. However, the counting method is highly accurate and a better trade off. If you stick to the “unit,” you have to do a ballpark estimate of how many heads of lettuce a small piece would equate to. It is best to convert units to a typical average weight that is observed, and then tweak it from time to time if you notice the sizes start changing drastically.
Purchase Items in the Units They Are Invoiced
If you try to keep all your purchases in the same units, you have to stop and do conversions for every line item. Instead of doing this, bring the invoice in as it is and do your conversions to a single unit, like ounces, on the back end of your reporting. This will enable you to keep your sanity when you get an invoice where every line item is in different units.
Wherever I can, I will use an automated invoice reader that looks at the units on each invoice, does the conversions, and automatically enters the data.
However, there are always kitchens that can't avoid the paper invoices and receipts from grocery stores, and these must be entered manually. Those will always be entered in the units that are on each receipt. And if the description on each receipt is vague as to the exact quantity received, I will do a ballpark estimate based on a common cost per ounce that is found on the internet.
Always enter purchases in the units they are invoiced in.
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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