There’s no doubt about it, the hospitality industry is incredibly competitive. Restaurant profit margins are thin, costs are always rising and high-quality labour is becoming increasingly more difficult to find.
To succeed, restaurants must have complete visibility and control over their inventory. They need to know how much they are spending, how much they are using, and the profit margins of the menu items they are selling.
The only way to accurately get this data is through technology.
Whether you are an early adopter of technology in the restaurant space or just joining the game, technology isn’t going away any time soon. It’s advancing faster than ever, with more tools to choose from every single year.
So, what technologies does your restaurant need to succeed in 2021? We’ve listed four essential tools here:
Inventory management system
In a restaurant your main priority is to make your customers happy. All too often, however, restaurant owners forget that they make money not just from customer satisfaction, but by selling goods and services that cost their business money.
Every item that comes out of your kitchen or bar has a cost that your restaurant has spent its money on. Selling goods under cost and not focusing on your restaurant’s margins means the profitability of your business will suffer.
The number one way of evaluating your restaurant’s costs and profit margins is through inventory management.
A food inventory management system will give your restaurant complete visibility and control over its inventory, with insights into food waste, deadstock, profit margins, cost of goods, actual vs ideal usage and much more.
These insights help your business make smarter inventory decisions and processes that drive up profitability.
Point of sale (POS) system
Point of sale (POS) systems have long been a staple of restaurant technology, but new advances in POS technology are helping restaurants to improve their operational processes even further.
Modern point of sale systems, such as touch screen terminals, use powerful hardware and easy-to-use interfaces so that employees can operate them fast and accurately. This has simplified the order-taking process, ensuring that your restaurant is able to place orders faster and drive up revenue.
Online ordering
So many restaurants are still taking every order from their customers on pen and paper. That works for some restaurants, but new technology means ordering can be streamlined right at the table through online ordering and mobile applications.
New technologies such as QR-code menus are now allowing customers to order dishes directly to their table from their own personal cell phone. Not only does this streamline the entire ordering process for your restaurant, it helps you save money on printing out new menus!
Recipe management
If you have dishes that you are preparing in the kitchen or recipes behind the bar that have uncontrolled food costs, it can get out of hand pretty quickly. Having a recipe management program helps.
Recipe management, which should be a functionality within your restaurant inventory management system, is a tool that helps your restaurant standardize recipes for menu items, calculate the cost for each recipe and monitor how those costs change over time.
Recipe management gives you all of the data you need to focus on your menu in terms of profitability. You will be able to use sales insights and inventory data on profit margins to gain complete visibility into the menu items that not only sell best, but also make your restaurant the most money.
Want to learn more about how technology can help make your restaurant more profitable? Contact Sculpture Hospitality today. Our team of locally-based consultants would love to answer any questions that you may have.