Cut Restaurant Costs – Trash Cans Tell the Story
Don’t worry, you won’t set a new fashion trend, but don a pair of rubber gloves, dishwasher’s apron, the oldest clothes you have and those old tennis shoes you were going to throw out. Now start digging in every trash can, bag, garbage can and any other waste container inside or outside your building. What are you looking for? Here is just a small list:
- Look for what customers send back on their plates. Discover what they don’t like or the side dishes you are wasting money putting on the plate.
- Look for multiple half-eaten entrée’s. This may reveal a lot about the special of the night or that stuffed grouper you thought was so good.
- How about that half a pan of mashed potatoes your cooks threw out from the previous evening? You could have made many things from them. Or that half of a red onion the prep guys didn’t need.
- The celery tops, onion skins, parsley stems, green pepper centers and tomato ends would make an awesome vegetable stock.
- While you are in the trash digging around, you might as well pick out those cocktail forks you keep replacing, the ramekins and butter knives too.
- Seafood restaurants need those shrimp shells, fish bones and lobster heads for a soup base.
- Oh yes, then there is that quart of tuna salad that someone let spoil.
- What about those half dozen empty Corona bottles in the bottom of the kitchen prep bag of trash? Was someone pilfering beer and, worse yet, drinking while working?
It’s not a pretty job, but amazing things are uncovered in those thin little layers of plastic that hide many sins and waste. Everything from sloppy servers and busboys to poor kitchen management can be discovered in a morning of dumpster diving.
If you want to make an impact on your staff, save and separate everything you find. While gross and extreme, cost cutting internally is just lip service until people understand the lengths you are willing to go to run a profitable restaurant. Your employees expect wage increases, benefits and good working conditions. You expect conformity to policies, good judgment and common sense by each staff member. It’s a fair trade.
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I couldn’t agree with you more. I have found so much out about the restaurants I have managed by looking in the trash. Even though I was always there, I found out what was going on when I wasn’t looking. I learned that I needed to be the dishwasher every once in a while to see what people liked and didn’t. It could be cooked wrong that night or a bigger problem would be it was just always bad. In either case the trash can doesn’t lie. Love the post. It is right on.