Comments for O'Dell Restaurant Consulting's Blog

Comment on Pricing food – Why you're doing it wrong and how to fix it by bodellconsulting

bodellconsulting — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 07:04:18 +0000

Reblogged this on O'Dell Restaurant Consulting's Blog and commented:

Bringing this article back around. It's a good read.

Comment on What makes a successful restaurant? by bodellconsulting

bodellconsulting — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 05:17:48 +0000

Reblogged this on O'Dell Restaurant Consulting's Blog.

Comment on How do I figure my food cost? by bodellconsulting

bodellconsulting — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 18:14:47 +0000

Theoretically, yes, though there are a lot of other contributing factors into what your actual food cost will end up. You have to make sure your recipes are accurately calculated including a factor for waste, cooking oil, condiments, spices and seasoning, complimentary breads, butter, cream for coffee, etc, etc. If you don’t consider every factor of your cost of goods into your recipe, you won’t end up with the percent you budget. You also must be able to control your costs after you set your prices in order to achieve that budgeted cost. Here is an article I wrote about controlling costs: http://blog.bodellconsulting.com/2010/06/07/20-steps-to-lowering-your-food-or-liquor-costs/.

I don’t suggest to anyone to divide by a budgeted cost percentage to get their sales prices regardless. This method of pricing doesn’t do well to include every cost of doing business. If you are only considering your food cost when you set your price, you have no way of guaranteeing your labor cost, rent, and every other expense will be within your budget. You could end up underpricing, or worse, over-pricing for your market also. Here is an article I wrote on pricing food that gives you a more comprehensive method for pricing that can nearly “guarantee” profit while preventing you from overpricing: http://blog.bodellconsulting.com/2008/06/26/pricing-food-why-youre-doing-it-wrong-and-how-to-fix-it/.

Comment on How do I figure my food cost? by Randy Thompson

Randy Thompson — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 21:01:18 +0000

so If an operator wanted 30% food costs, it would be, cost of recipe divided by 30% to get the sell price, correct?

Comment on “Next Great Restaurant” New York location closed after 1 month by Robert

Robert — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 21:45:50 +0000

Nice find Brandon. I had no idea this concept failed.

So many successful owners unleash unlimited expansion plans and it ends up closing them all. Two locations across town must make more than double the income as one properly ran restaurant. Three locations across the country is destine the fail without the right technology to make them function as one. It takes money, cooking skills, physical ability to work long hours, social skills and a firm grasp of accounting, business and technology to make a restaurant successful. This is all before concept, food or service. – ViewGistics, Inc.

Comment on How do I figure my food cost? by bodellconsulting

bodellconsulting — Sun, 23 Oct 2011 01:18:39 +0000

It sounds like you are just using the “trimmings” from your existing brisket for your chopped brisket? In this case, there is no real cost of brisket for your chopped brisket if it is already calculated into the cost of your sliced brisket. What you are doing is not calculating the “food cost” per se, it’s calculating the “recipe cost”.

If you take a recipe sheet with all the ingredients needed to make a “batch” of smoked brisket (i.e. raw brisket, rub or marinade, etc), and add up the cost of all the ingredients in that batch, you only then have to calculate how many portions of sliced brisket is yielded from that batch to have a recipe cost for sliced brisket. Then, the trimmings that are left over will already have been costed into a recipe and will not have to be costed out again in your chopped brisket recipe.

Comment on How do I figure my food cost? by Austin

Austin — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 16:07:32 +0000

Our tough question is this: we’re are a BBQ restaurant and currently we calculate our chopped brisket food cost by 1. weigh a whole raw brisket 2. smoke the brisket 3. weigh the whole smoked brisket, then trim and weigh the whole brisket and we arrive at the sliced brisket food cost. After calculating the sliced brisket food cost we trim and chop the WHOLE trimmed brisket and calculate our chopped brisket food cost. We have decided that this isn’t a very accurate method because currently we chopped the entire brisket to arrive at the chopped price when in actuality our chopped brisket isn’t a whole chopped brisket but rather made up of brisket deemed not suitable for sale as sliced brisket and comes from numerous whole briskets. What do you suggest we do to arrive at a more accurate chopped brisket food cost?

Comment on You do have a customer database, don’t you? by Marty

Marty — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 19:29:12 +0000

Your customer database is critical for long term success.

The challenge I have is when you say you want feedback using a comment card but what you really want is consumer data you are devaluing the “comment card” even more. Restaurant customers are tired of being told that restaurants care about their feedback when in reality all the restaurant wants is data.

Customer feedback is a critical business tool also and should be devalued!

It’s better to ask for real time customer feedback and give the customer the option to share their personal information with you.

Comment on A Groupon nightmare by EatDrinkVictoria

EatDrinkVictoria — Sat, 17 Sep 2011 03:09:17 +0000

A lot of good points here. I have a friend who is a server in a local restaurant and she didn’t like Groupon because of the fact that the customers tended to tip way less than the average (they tip on the lowered amount after the discount). I guess it depends how desperate you are for business!

Comment on A Groupon nightmare by bodellconsulting

bodellconsulting — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 18:18:38 +0000

In my experience, it’s never as easy as just “stopping” them. If you build your business on coupons, you must sustain your business on coupons. Stopping the coupons stops the coupon clippers from coming in. Pizza Hut is a great recent example. They attempted to save millions in print costs recently by pushing discounted every day prices instead attracting people via coupons. The problem is, the people who come to their restaurant ARE coupon clippers. If they don’t offer the coupons, those people quit coming in and sales as a whole suffer. That said, most pizza chains know how to price coupon discounts into their pricing structure so they are not using coupons as a “loss leader”. They are using them to give the illusion of extra value by overpricing their menu to make the coupons look like a better deal. This strategy has obviously worked for them for a long time, but most restaurant owners are not aware of how the strategy works so they simply “discount” and devalue their product. Their loss leader turns into just a plain ‘ol loss.