Boost Your Profits with Yield and Portion Analysis

For a successful restaurant, food costs generally make up 30-35% of total expenses. If it’s higher, it’s time to cut.

There are many moving parts when it comes to cutting food costs, and we believe analyzing a restaurant’s menu item yield is a critical first step. This is why, at FDR, we offer menu yield analysis for our clients.

What Is Yield Analysis?

Yield analysis is all about reducing costs by making the most of your ingredients. It seeks to minimize loss every step along the way— from when the ingredients are ordered to the moment the meal is put down in front of the customer. Recipe yield analysis is important because it results in a more consistent product, shorter training time, and more profitability for you.

The service typically includes:

Comparing raw to cooked ingredients price/weight. How many tomatoes do you need to order for the marinara sauce this weekend? This is essential to avoiding loss due to over/under ordering.

Evaluating loss in the kitchen. Loss happens in the kitchen in the form of shrinkage, waste, trim, and spoilage. You paid a certain amount for that chicken, but what’s the real cost of it once it’s been trimmed and cooked?

Portion size. As a customer, it’s hard to get mad about a heavy-handed pour at the bar or a giant-sized dollop of guac on your burrito; but when you’re a restaurant owner, those little unintentional moves add up and can be the difference between success and failure for your business.

FDR Menu Yield Analysis for Clients

At FDR, we offer menu yield analysis as one part of our operational analysis service. It starts with an evaluation that reveals inefficiencies in the production process. We convert pre to post cooked weights, test and retest recipes, and as part of the bigger operational analysis, we also fine tune the timing of each dish. Our expert chefs evaluate, streamline, and standardize your recipes in to make your restaurant as efficient and profitable as possible.

Clients come to us for restaurant yield analysis when:

• They think that spending in a particular category, like produce, for example, is off.
• They need a full recipe audit (this generally takes about a month).
• A business is about to be sold or has just been purchased and the client wants all of their ducks in a row.

Yield analysis is a science, and it can be difficult to do in-house. It’s just one of the services that we offer to re-boot restaurants. To learn more, contact us.