FOOD & BEVERAGE COST CONTROL

Food and beverage is seen and regarded by almost all as a volatile department within the hotel. With F&B, it’s never a straight forward deal I must admit. The problem however is more of management of the department than any myth some fifth columnist may want to weave. Get your control process right and you are half way there.

Generally, control is exercising power over events or sequence of situations towards achieving or preventing an outcome or expectations. In our private lives, we tend to control what we eat so as to reduce weight, increase weight, and look better and so on. Many people chose to stay faithful with one partner not because of love but for the risks involved in having multiple partners. God made rules and gave Moses a tab in order to control our behavior. Whether that worked or not depended on implementation and consequences to bear in case of default.
In Food and Beverage department, control is human based and not materials based as important as that is. For example, food cannot disappear by itself unless somebody takes it; liquor will not leak out of bottle without human assistance. Guests seldom walk away without paying if there is no accomplice in the department. In all of these scenarios, human complicity looms large either by omission or commission and you will concur that business cannot declare profit if human resources is not controlled.

There are preliminary and preemptive control processes like restricting access to stores to direct staff only will prevent contamination of food, locating cahiers desk close to the entrance of restaurant may prevent guests from walking out without paying, using standard measuring unit in the bar is also likely to prevent liquor loss. Similarly, having an effective pest control measures will guide against food loss that may arise from rodents’ encroachment in the store. As good and important as these rudimentary control procedures are, they can hardly contain the sophistication of today’s food and beverage leakages, outright theft and wastages.

The aim of F&B department is to make profit, and to probably run the best restaurant in town as a secondary ambition. To achieve this, you must have to operate above the elementary level and step into the complex world of cost control. Cost control is defined as the intricate process used to regulate costs and guard against excessive costs. It is an ongoing process and involves every step in the chain of purchasing, receiving, storing, issuing and preparing food and beverages for sale. This does not preclude training and scheduling of human resources appropriately for duties. Preferred method of cost control vary from hotel to hotel depending of course on scope and nature of operations but the principles are constant. The objective is the same; eliminate excessive costs attached to food and guard against operating inefficiencies.

Apart from cost control, there are sales controls, responsibility for controls, instituting controls to contend with. You will definitely agree with me that all these cannot be touched here for obvious reasons. For first aid to your food and beverage concerns, the following control techniques may come handy. Establishing standard and procedures are the very first step; training, setting examples, staff discipline, periodic closings and many others follow. There is available software that will solve your food and beverages issues without you raising a finger in our office. We can also process manage your food and beverage department manually towards achieving the same objective. Kindly contact the undersigned.

Patrick Adegbamigbe
Hospitality Consultant
234 80 57736980