Restaurateurs: watch you waste! - column

March 15, 1991. It was 8 a.m. The scene: the monthly general managers' meeting for our own six restaurants in Denver. John "Doe" Gardner, one of our founding fathers, opened the meeting with the following remark:

"The restaurant and bar business are the only business I know of where there are more ways to lose money than to make money."

How true. Think of the daily liabilities we face in our business. Payroll. Utilities. Taxes. Liquor. Dry goods. Breakage. Spoilage. Theftage. (Whoops, excuse me ... Theft. Don't you just hate it when you find out you have several silint partners?)

So you have two choices: talk about controlling costs or promote behavior that will control costs, every day. Enough talk about how hard it's raining. Now let's talk about how to build the ark. Here are 15 ways to help watch your waste:

(1) Train your service staff.

Set up regularly scheduled cost control seminars for your service staff. Teach them how to: properly load and unload bus tubs, stack dishes, scrape plates so you don't lose flatware or napkins in the trash, etc. Include this information in all your training manuals. Test the transfer of knowledge through oral and written quizzes.

(2) Train your kitchen crew.

Present regular seminars to your kitchen staff on: importance of portion control, equipment maintenance, safety and proper storage, rotation and prep procedures that minimize waste and control costs.

Include these ideas in their written training materials in both English and Spanish. Quiz and test them. Require all kitchen employees to score 90 percent or better.

(3) Train your dishwasher.

Nail an empty 5-quart bucket to the wall by the dishwasher so he or she can throw unopened sugar, crackers, jelly and creamer packets into it that have been left on or in dirty plates, bowls or glasses. Then reconcile the bucket's individual contents back to their proper storage places as the last thing the dishwasher does before leaving.

Consider giving the dishwasher a cash bonus for each bucket he collects and reconciles.

Again: what you reinforce is what you get.

(4) Audit your garbage

Schedule a different employee to help a manager sift through a randomly selected garbage can at least once a week (every week) for items that shouldn't have been thrown away.

Dig out the carelessly tossed cocktail forks, ramekins, knives, spoons, unopened sugar or cracker packets, etc. Count up the cost of the broken physical inventory (glasses, plates, bowls) or reusable items that have been thrown away in one trash can.

Now mltiply that figure times all the trash cans you emptied that night.

Now ... pour yourself a stiff drink! You'll not only find out what your employees like to throw away but alsolearn what your guests don't like to eat (maybe cream of spinach is a bad choice as vegetable of the month).

As trainer Jim Moffa says: "You can learn a lot by hanging around the dirty end of a dish machine!" We suggest you audit your garbage daily.

(5) Catch the waste before it gets to the dump.

Buy the commercially available magnetic traps that fit over your kitchen's garbage cans to help catch "accidentally" tossed flatware.

(6) Consider using a special waste bucket.

Choose a specific color waste bucket and use it in the kitchen for food that was prepared or ordered incorrectly and had to be thrown away.

Review the contents after each shift with the kitchen crew and tally up the dollar amount wasted. Set specific cash bonuses for a zero-mistakes shift goal. (Be careful of this one. Savvy cooks or servers soon learn to "bury their mistakes" in the recesses of the "generic" trash cans. It's worth a try, though.)

(7) Reinforce the costs.

Mount samples of your glasses, dishes, flatware, napkins, etc., on a piece of plywood with their prices posted next to each item.

Put this in a conspicuous high-traffic location in your kitchen. Point out to your employees that this is their raise they're throwing away when they're careless.

(8) Team bonus.

Consider giving a team bonus to your service and kitchen crew for lowering breakage or food costs. First determine how much your monthly physical inventory is costing you. Challege the crew to lower that by 50 percent. Offer 20 percent of the money saved as a cash bonus to the staff to be shared as a team.

(9) Recycle your glass products.

Many companies will pay you a penny a bottle for your recyclable glass. Look in your Yellow Pages under "recycling."

(10) Watch water wates.

Train prep people and kitchen crew to anticipate frozen items that need to be thawed and thaw them in the refrigerator, not other six hours of running tap water.

(11) Money down the toilet.

Fill one of your empty 5-quart sour cream or cottage cheese containers with water and place it in the back of your toilet tank. You'll use less water to flush.

(12) No more free pour.

Provide and require the use of a jigger for every cocktail your bartender makes. Does your gas station let you "free-hour" 10 dollars worth of gas?

(13) Don't "eyeball" your specs.

Don't let your cooks or prep people "eyeball" the correct portions of your food recipes (same as the gas station example above). Have plenty of scales handy to expedite this practice. More important, check obsessively to make sure they're using those scales. Remember: You get what you inspect, not what you expect.

(14) Reward waste watching.

Offer a monthly plaque, trophy, gift certificate or cash award to the best cost-saving employee idea.

(15) Offer a bounty.

Greg Huntsacker of V's Restaurant in Kansas City, Mo., passed this thought on to me: Have an "Amnesty week for adopted dry goods." Pay 20 cents for every glass, plate dish, fork, knife and spoon that your servers voluntarily bring bank to your restaurant from their own kitchen cabinets and drawers.

The key here is to reinforce a different method for "waste-watching" every day at your preshift team meetings for both service staff and kitchen crew. Set specific waste watching or cost-control goals each shift. What you reinforce is what you get. What you don't reinforce is what you lose!

How many of you have ever been bitten by an elephant? Well then, how many of you have ever been bitten by a mosquito? Hmm. Suspicions confirmed. It's not the "big" things that eat us alive in this business; it's the little things.

Jim Sullivan, president of Denver-based PENCOM, helps operate six restaurants and bars there. This article is excerpted from his new book, "Service that Sells!" (PENCOM Press, Denver, $16.95.) He is a frequent speaker at restaurant seminars and shows.

COPYRIGHT 1991 Reproduced with permission of the copyright holder. Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited without permission.
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