Alex Ponomarev
A restaurant can be busy, sales can look healthy, and suppliers can still be charging reasonable prices, yet food costs keep creeping up.
For restaurant operators across the MENA region, this can be frustrating. You may already be checking stock, reviewing invoices and keeping an eye on food cost percentages. So where is the money going?
Often, the problem is not one large expense. It is a series of operational issues happening during everyday operations: food waste, missed stock movements, inconsistent portions, supplier price increases, and disconnected reporting.
Here are five areas worth looking at.
1. Your stock records may not match reality
Inventory numbers can look precise while still being wrong.
Consider a restaurant in Dubai that receives stock several times a week. A carton of cooking oil is moved from the main storage area to the kitchen, but the transfer is not recorded. A few damaged items are thrown away without being entered into the system. Someone also types the wrong quantity during the weekly stock count.
By the end of the month, the system may show more stock than the restaurant actually has. That affects food cost calculations and makes it harder to understand where the variance came from.
The opposite can happen too. If stock is recorded lower than it really is, food cost may suddenly look unusually high.
The key issue is not how often you count. It is whether the same process is followed every time.
2. Waste is often hiding in plain sight
Food waste rarely arrives as one significant event. It usually happens in small amounts throughout the day.
A tray of rice prepared for a quieter shift is left unused. Fresh produce reaches the end of its shelf life. A sauce is prepared in larger quantities than needed. A customer leaves half a meal behind.
This is particularly important during periods when demand changes. Ramadan, weekends, public holidays and seasonal events can all affect customer patterns. Preparing based on habit rather than actual demand can leave kitchens with more food than they can sell.
A restaurant in Cairo, for example, might prepare the same volume every evening because that was the usual pattern last month. If customer traffic changes, part of that preparation may end up as waste.
Waste becomes much easier to control when it is recorded by type and reason. Otherwise, the business knows that food is being discarded but not why.
3. Portions can grow without anyone noticing
A restaurant does not need to drastically increase its serving sizes to raise food costs.
An extra spoonful of rice. A few more grams of chicken. A little more cheese. A heavier pour of sauce.
These differences are easy to miss during a busy service. Staff may not even realise they are doing it. They may be trying to make the plate look generous or simply relying on judgement instead of measurement.
Imagine a popular grilled chicken dish. The recipe is designed around a fixed quantity of chicken, but the actual portion varies from one employee to another. Sales remain steady, yet the kitchen starts using more chicken than the recipe should require.
The clue is often the gap between theoretical food cost and actual food cost. When ingredients are being used faster than the recipes and sales figures suggest, portion control is one of the areas worth checking.
4. Supplier prices can change while your menu stays the same
A supplier may increase the price of meat, dairy, oil, vegetables or other frequently used ingredients. When those changes happen across several suppliers, it becomes easy to overlook them.
The bigger problem is that not every dish absorbs a price increase in the same way.
Suppose a restaurant in the UAE regularly sells a chicken-based dish at a strong margin. If the cost of chicken rises, that dish may become much less profitable even though the selling price has not changed.
Meanwhile, another menu item using ingredients with stable prices may continue performing well.
This is why simply reviewing the total amount spent on purchasing is not enough. Operators also need to understand how changing ingredient costs affect individual recipes and menu items.
A dish can remain one of your best sellers while quietly becoming one of your weaker contributors to profit.
5. Your reports may tell you what happened, but not why
Many restaurants already have plenty of data.
You may have sales reports from your POS, purchasing information from suppliers, inventory records, waste logs and recipe costs. The challenge comes when all of this information sits separately.
A manager looking at a food cost increase may need to move between several spreadsheets and systems to find the reason.
Was there more waste this month?
Did ingredient prices increase?
Were portions larger?
Was stock transferred incorrectly?
Did actual usage move away from the recipe?
When these numbers are disconnected, finding the answer can take longer than it should. A connected view of sales, inventory, purchasing, recipes and waste makes the pattern much easier to see.
What can restaurants do about it?
Once the source of the problem is clearer, the next step is to build simple controls around the areas that can create food cost leakage.
Standardise inventory processes
Use the same counting method, units and schedule across the operation. Record transfers, damaged goods, returns and adjustments rather than trying to correct them later.
Compare physical stock with system records regularly, and investigate repeated variances instead of treating them as normal.
Track waste by cause
Record what was wasted, how much was wasted and why. Separate spoilage, overproduction, preparation waste and returned food.
Review the figures regularly to identify recurring problems. If a particular ingredient is repeatedly being thrown away, look at purchasing quantities, storage and preparation levels.
Check portions against recipes
Focus first on high-volume and high-cost dishes.
Weigh ingredients during preparation and compare the actual amounts with the standard recipe. Use suitable scales, scoops or other measuring tools where needed, and provide clear portion guidelines for kitchen staff.
Regular spot checks can help identify inconsistencies early.
Review supplier prices and recipe costs together
Do not look only at the total purchasing bill.
Track changes in the price of key ingredients and recalculate the recipes that depend heavily on them. Then review whether the current menu price still supports the expected margin.
Where necessary, restaurants can consider supplier negotiations, alternative sourcing, recipe adjustments or menu price changes.
Bring your operational data together
Inventory, purchasing, sales, recipe costing and waste data are most useful when they can be reviewed together.
A connected restaurant management platform can reduce the need to compare separate spreadsheets and make unusual changes easier to spot. Alerts, variance reports and centralised data can also help managers identify issues earlier.
Take control of your food costs with Syrve
Stop spending time piecing together inventory, purchasing, recipe and sales data to find out where your food costs are going.
With Syrve, you can bring these processes together, track costs more closely and spot operational issues faster.
See how Syrve can help you take control of your restaurant's food costs. Explore Syrve today and book a demo.
