Hey guys, my name is Wilson.
Today we're going to be talking about how do you calculate your food cost.
Now, first and foremost, why is food cost so important?
There are basically three types of costs that would determine whether your business goes
bankrupt, or whether you would be having a thriving restaurant business.
The three types of expenses are your rental cost, your labor cost, and your food cost.
So these three things adds up to close to 75% to 90% of your revenue, okay?
So what that means is that if you can control one sector and one component of this cost,
you're going to be able to maximize the amount of profit that you can bring home.
Okay?
And in the food and beverage world nowadays, the margins are really thin and enough, we're
talking about 5% to 10%.
So what that means is, if you learn how to calculate, and when you'd learn how to calculate
food cost, you're going to be able to better control this item.
And when you can better control this item, that means that you can have a bigger pie
and bigger profit, that's in bigger [inaudible 00:01:08], which is the reason why today we're
going to be talking about how are you going to be able to calculate your food cost.
So now that you understand the importance of why food cost is so important, I also want
to bring to you the three benefits of actually understanding it.
Okay?
It is because the first benefit is so then that way you can strategize and engineer a
new menu.
There are items on your menu that once you calculate the food cost, you can understand
and you would know that does not make sense because these items, every time you sell one,
you're losing money, because for example, if the cost of your burger is like $8, but
you're selling it for only $12, then that means that your cost of goods sold is way
too high to sustain this product.
That means you're not making money from this product.
Aside from cost of goods sold, you also need to account for your labor, your rent and everything.
And when your account everything within this item, it's not making money, then why are
you selling it?
Same thing goes with actually creating new items.
To give you an example, whenever we create ice cream flavors, we'd always look at, we
always start up from how much of a budget can we work towards?
How much of a budget do we have to create this new item?
So for example, if we sell our ice cream or a part of a dessert menu item that is you're
selling for $8, then we know we can't spend more than $2 whenever we're testing this new
product, whether it be the toppings, whether it be the ice cream base, whether it be the
presentation itself, everything adding up cannot be more than $2 because now we understand
our food cost.
Whereas if you did not understand food cost, you'd be putting in tons of topping just to
make this ice cream stand out, make it look super amazing, yet the cost is $5.
How can you make any money from that?
You can't, which is a reason why understanding food cost is so, so important.
On the same token, the second benefit of truly understanding your food cost is that you can
actually run proper promotions.
And what I mean by that is if you're running promotion, so many of us are running promotions,
but we don't even know if we're making money or not.
If you are, every time you sell a product, every time you sell an item, it's not making
money, then why are you running that promotion?
It's a lose-lose game.
Okay?
Your clients and your customers are so used to you running promotions, that they won't
purchase from you, unless you run a promotion.
And at the same time, you keep running promotions that are not generating you any profits, then
what's the point of a lose-lose scenario?
On the same token, if you understand food cost, if you understand, for example, a piece
of cookie, it costs you around 25 cents to 50 cents to make, and you retail, and you
sell it all to the public for $5.
That's a really healthy margin that you have, and if you want to use your cookie as a promotional
item where you know what?
Come and buy a cookie for 50% off, tons of people will be flooding in.
You're going to charge them 250, yeah, it takes you 50 cents to make, and you still
have a ton of margin to play with.
You still are able to benefit from that, and to be able to profit from that, which is a
reason why you can be very strategical when you're running these promotions that half-price
cookies and when people come in for their cookie, they're going to order a cup of milk,
which you can charge a full price, and that's a very, very smart way of any promotions all
because of the fact that we understand cost of goods sold.
Food cost.
The third and final benefit I'm going to be sharing with you today is that you can actually
make more profits by understanding the seasonality of the cost of the goods that you're buying.
So for example, produce, fruits.
Whenever we have any summer promotions, we usually buy our strawberries or mangoes at
the peak, at the more supplied at the time that the produce is being harvested.
We buy a ton of it, and then we cut it up, and then we freeze it, so then that way we
have an ample supply of ingredients.
Why do we do that?
It is because mangoes don't always come that cheap.
Usually within a month time they become more and more expensive as the season fades on.
But because of the fact that we understand that.
We understand cost of good sold, we're able to strategize, buy them in bulk, buy them
and store them, and then now throughout the season, we can actually control the cost and
thus bringing us much more profits at the end of the day.
So now that you understand why it's on point, some of the benefits, and with more advanced
strategies of how to use food cost.
We're going to dive right into how are you going to be able to calculate your food cost
for your restaurant.
Before I do that, I'm going to explain to you a little bit more about food cost.
Food cost is basically, usually comes in a percentage form, okay?
And what I mean by that is usually it's the cost of making that food item.
It's the direct cost.
Okay?
What I mean by that is inventory, all the ingredients that it takes to create that item.
We're talking about, for example, if we're talking about ice cream, okay?
We're talking about the cups, we're talking about the napkins, we're talking about the
dry ice that we have, we're talking about the milk, we're talking about the powders,
the sugar, the topping.
These are all the ingredients that goes into making this item, okay?
And on top of that, we need to add in the direct cost of preparing the ice cream.
So what I mean by that is, before we actually have that ice cream, we need to create a mixed.
A mix that we can pour into that ice cream machine that turns out soft stir.
Now, for us to create, for us to have the labor to create this box of mix, that itself
is a direct cost that goes into creating the item, not just the ingredient cost.
So for example, I need to have a labor, I need to find a staff to pour all the ingredients
in this bucket, blend it up, and then pour into the machine to make the ice cream.
For example, if it takes my staff an hour to create this product, then I would add this
hour into our food cost as well.
To give you a better example with numbers to just to simplify.
Okay?
In an ideal world, the ideal food cost of how much it takes.
50 cents for the cone.
Okay?
50 cents for the milk.
50 cents for making all the toppings.
And another 50 cents for the person that creates that bucket of mix.
Okay?
And how do we get down 50 cents for the person that creates that mix?
Well, if it takes that person an hour to create the mix, and if the mix can create let's say
30 cups of ice cream, then we can just divide 30 with that person's hourly wage.
So for example, if he gets paid $10 an hour, then we use 10 divided by 30, which comes
up to be 30 cents, then we would add that to the cost of good sold.
So for the sake of this example, we said that that is 50 cents.
So if you add everything up, that is $2 for making that cup of ice cream, that becomes
your cost of goods sold.
That becomes how much it cost.
Now use that number divided by how much you actually sell the product for.
So for example, if we sell the ice cream for $5 to the public, then we use $2 divided by
$5 to get our cost of goods sold.
Typically speaking, cost of goods sold should range from, I would say 15% to 30%.
30% is the maximum that we would want for cost of good sold.
And at the end of the day, the higher the cost of goods sold, the less profit that we
can make, the less profit that we put into our pockets.
So now that you understand, in an ideal world how much cost of goods sold are for that ice
cream.
20% is what we're talking about.
But in reality, we have not taken into two big concerns.
Number one is wastage.
And the second one is theft.
In an ideal world, this we don't, we take out.
But in reality, this happens all the time.
These two components, food wastage and theft is always something that's going to happen.
And what I mean by that is, for example, if we created a batch of ice cream, and that
whole batch is $20.
If we retail it for $5, how much can we make?
In theory, we're going to be able to make $100 in revenue.
That equates to 20%.
But because of the fact that, you know what?
When we were cleaning the machine, we ended up wasting a batch of ice cream.
Then in turn, those ice cream that we wasted cannot be sold as revenue.
So what that means is maybe our revenue becomes $90.
On the same token, if I'm the staff, and my friend comes in and then I am like, "Hey,
you know what?
Jason, thanks for coming in.
I'm going to give you a free cup of ice cream.
Here you go."
But we never charged him.
That means that for the same amount of ingredient, which is $20 of ingredient, I did not receive
one order, which is $5.
So that brings down the revenue in addition to all the wastage.
So you can now imagine in reality that maybe the revenue that we bring in is only $80 instead
of $100.
With this calculation, we use $20 divided by $80 to get the real actual cost of goods
sold, which becomes 25% versus in an ideal world, to a 20% cost of goods sold.
The reason why I'm explaining the ideal food cost and the actual food cost to you is because
we need to understand in theory everything is perfect.
However, our job as owners, we need to understand what is realistic.
What is it, and how we can control the cost of good sold.
So now that we understand the two biggest components, food wastage and theft, we're
going to have to keep a lot of close eyes to maintain and to take this element and to
prevent these things from happening to ensure that our cost of goods sold isn't an optimal
percentage.
Now, how can we do that?
Then we can have better processes, for example, cleaning, better processes of optimizing the
food ingredients that we use, better processes to understand and to prevent people from stealing,
and giving away and copying different meals.
This all adds up to your profits.
So at the end of the day, you need to make sure and why are we even calculating food
cost?
The reason why we're calculating food cost is for us to be aware of how much we're actually
spending.
Now, how do you calculate actual food cost?
All you have to do is, in the beginning of the month, check your inventory.
At the end of the month, check your inventory again.
Take the difference, then that's the amount of ingredients that you've used throughout
the month, and you're going to be able to use that to benchmark it against the revenue
you generate for each food item, and then you're going to have a better understanding
of the actual food cost.
And for you to understand it, now you can manage it properly, so then that way you can
gain more profits into your pockets.
So there you go.
We just talked about the importance of understanding your food cost.
We just talked about how do you calculate your ideal food cost versus your actual food
cost.
As a rule of thumb, we want to be able to aim for maximum 30% of an actual food cost
because anything higher, you're going to be left with no margin to play with.
So many times where we're actually looking at our bank account, we're like, "Wow, we're
making tons of money on paper, but in our bank account, money's not showing up."
It is because of our expenses out beats the revenue that we bring in.
Just because we make $10,000 doesn't mean that all goes into our pocket.
We need to pay for tons of money for rent, tons of money for labor, tons of money for
cost of good sold.
So our job as owners, as restaurateurs is to control this cost, minimize it, the below
30, so then that way we can have a healthy margins for us to take home.
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I'll see you guys in the next video.