Loss prevention is a set of practices adopted with the goal of reducing a company's financial and operational losses.
In the case of restaurants, it's applied mainly to the ingredient inventory, helping to reduce operating costs, increase profitability, and ensure the quality of the service provided to customers.
In this article, understand what loss prevention is, why it matters, and how to implement it in your restaurant. Follow along!
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What is loss prevention?
Loss prevention is a strategy used to keep a company from losing resources due to waste, fraud, theft, or errors, for example.
It brings a proactive approach, since the goal is to identify the main causes of losses and implement processes to prevent them from happening. This way, it contributes to efficient resource management, ensuring organizations' financial health and operational efficiency.
This strategy is applied in several sectors, such as retail and manufacturing, for example. In restaurants, it's used mainly in inventory management, and plays a key role in helping the business reach a good profit margin. Learn more below!
Why is it important to prevent losses in restaurants?
Restaurants invest a good part of their capital in buying ingredients to produce the dishes and drinks offered on the menu. So an establishment that loses a lot of ingredients also loses a lot of money.
This brings a series of consequences: menu items out of stock, customer dissatisfaction, rising costs, shrinking profit margins (or even losses), and compromised cash flow.
In other words: loss prevention is indispensable for the restaurant to reach satisfactory financial results, with profitability that ensures the business's survival and longevity.
What are the main causes of losses in restaurants?
To implement an effective loss prevention strategy in restaurants, you first need to identify the main causes of losses. Among the most common are:
Expired shelf life
Most of the ingredients used in restaurants are perishable and have limited shelf lives. Expired ingredients can't be used and end up being thrown away.
Incorrect storage
Improper food storage can cause spoilage, deterioration, and contamination. Incorrect temperatures, inadequate humidity, and lack of organization are factors that contribute to inventory loss.
Inventory shrinkage
Unfortunately, it's still very common for employees themselves to divert ingredients from the inventory. Without proper control, it's hard to identify and prevent this kind of shrinkage.
Over-purchasing
When the restaurant has no demand predictability, it can end up over-purchasing. This can result in idle inventory and a large amount of expired products.
After identifying the main causes of losses in your restaurant, you can start implementing best practices to stop them from happening. Check out our tips below!
5 practical tips for loss prevention in restaurants
Best practices for loss prevention in restaurants are tied to efficient inventory management. After all, with effective controle de estoque in place, losses can be reduced significantly.
Below, we list some practical tips that can help optimize processes and reduce losses in your restaurant. Check them out!
1. Track inventory accuracy
Constantly monitor inventory accuracy, checking whether the records in the system match the physical count. This helps identify and fix problems quickly, avoiding bigger losses.
2. Apply the FIFO (First In, First Out) methodology
Use the FIFO methodology, also known as “First in, first out,” to make sure the oldest products are used first.
Train your stock clerk to always store new products behind or below the older ones. This helps prevent food from going past its expiration date and needing to be discarded.
Learn more: 15 tips on how to organize a restaurant inventory
3. Restrict access
To reduce the risk of theft and shrinkage, restrict access to inventory storage areas. That way, only authorized employees will be able to enter. If it makes sense, install monitoring cameras.
If you don't have a dedicated space for inventory, you can use padlocks on freezers and cabinets, for example. That's a simple solution that already limits access and provides greater security.
4. Keep a central inventory and a kitchen one
Keep a central inventory and a smaller one in the kitchen. The central inventory should be used to store most of the ingredients, while the kitchen inventory should hold only what's needed for the day.
This helps control ingredient use better and avoids waste and shrinkage.
5. Automate inventory control
Use a inventory control system to automate processes such as recording stock in and out and monitoring minimum and maximum inventory levels, for example.
These systems help keep accurate records, alert you about products nearing expiration, and make order and purchase management easier. This way, you can reduce human error and gain more operational efficiency.
Prevent losses and control inventory with EPOC
As we've seen, many of the best practices for loss prevention are tied to efficient inventory control. That's why it's essential to choose a restaurant system with features that let you manage inventory well.
EPOC is a platform with POS, ERP, Analytics solutions and much more. With it, you can automate inventory control, setting up recipe cards and recipes for maximum accuracy.
To find out how we can help your restaurant, schedule a conversation with our consultants and tell us what your challenges are.
