What does it mean to offer a comprehensive assessment in terms of supporting a restaurant or food service business?
At Emerald Coast Restaurant Consulting, we know a lot about this process. We are actively engaged in helping our clients to get the deep analysis and insights that they need to streamline operations, stay competitive and drive efficiencies in a very competitive market.
Here are some of the most important aspects of what we do in a comprehensive restaurant operations assessment.
Processes and Systems
As we point out on the website, our restaurant operations assessment includes review of all relevant processes and systems, to determine how well your restaurant is competing. You can imagine that detailed analysis of HACCP food safety standards and the restaurant equipment that you use on a daily basis would uncover valuable information about whether the restaurant is performing up to standards and up to its own potential or not.
Price-Value Relationships
It’s also critically important to include review of inventory, and various relationships between expenses and the value that the restaurant receives. Part of that involves scrutinizing vendor and supplier contracts. We can often find efficiencies there. But another part of it has to do with moving “from the walk-in to the range” – it has to do with how the restaurant is using food inventories.
One way to understand this is to visualize it. Staff routinely takes food from freezers and refrigerated environments, thaws and heats, and brings that food to the other end of the safe temperature range, before keeping it carefully protected from emerging bacteria until it’s time to serve.
That is one of those critical and fundamental processes that has quite a few moving parts, and becomes an integral part of a restaurant operations assessment that really provides value.
Management and Training
Obviously, despite all top-level planning, some of the responsibility for operations rests with on-site daily crew members and frontline staff. With that in mind, evaluating the skills and experience of management is one component, and looking at how plating and food safety are actively managed is another important part of this type of review.
In addition, we focus on sales evaluation, vendor supplier evaluation and last but not least, menu evaluation. Along with making changes to inventory, making changes to a menu can really change a restaurant’s profit margin and how it operates day to day, month to month, or year to year. For more, talk to us about how to get the data that you need to make positive change happen.