The situation
I joined a restaurant that already had a kitchen cost control system in place. They asked me to take a look – and it soon turned out that the existing system was riddled with errors. Incorrect recipes, wrong units of measurement, faulty stock and base settings. Several things were wrong at once.
The challenge
The repairs had to be carried out alongside day-to-day work. There was no option to stop everything and rebuild – it had to be done on the go, working with the chef and the staff, moving from one error to the next.
The solution
I worked through the system systematically and corrected the discrepancies. The monthly stocktakes showed exactly where the problems were – which ingredients were short, and which were in surplus. The errors came from several directions: badly handled goods receiving, dating problems, faulty costings, mistyped decimal points. Behind every discrepancy there was a specific cause – and a specific fix.
The result
Within three months, running alongside the creative work, the system settled in. The first clean stocktake result showed the difference – the numbers started to add up. What had previously been invisible loss became visible and manageable.
