Industry Insights

I've lost count of how many times I've walked into a restaurant where the owner tells me, "Sales are up 20%, but somehow we're making less money than last year." It's frustrating, and unfortunately, it's common.

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The truth is, most F&B operations leak profit in ways that don't show up on your daily sales report. Here are the five I see most often, and what you can actually do about them.

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1. Inconsistent Portioning

It's a busy Friday night, the grill station is slammed, and that chicken breast goes from 180 grams to 220 grams because nobody's weighing anything.

An extra 40 grams of chicken, 200 times a week, you're looking at real money walking out the kitchen door.

What actually works: Pick your top 10 protein dishes. For one week, weigh every single portion that goes out. Not what the recipe says, what's actually on the plate. Then invest in proper scales and make it routine.

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2. Supplier Price Creep

Your tomato supplier raises prices by 2% in March. In June, another 3%. By December, you're paying 8% more than January, and nobody said anything dramatic enough for you to catch it.

What I tell clients: Keep a simple spreadsheet with your top 30 ingredients and what you paid last quarter. Once every three months, check the numbers. If something's up more than 5%, call the supplier.

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3. Overtime Mismanagement

Your restaurant does 40,000 dirhams on Saturday. Great night. But because the schedule was thrown together last minute, you paid four people overtime to cover it. Those "extra" hours cost you 1.5x to 2x normal rate.

The fix isn't complicated, look at your sales from the last few months. You can predict your busy days pretty accurately. Build your schedule around that data, not around who texts you Friday afternoon saying they can't make their shift.

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4. Menu Item Profitability Blindness

I've seen signature burgers with 42% food cost that tie up the grill during peak hours. Pasta dishes that take 15 minutes to prep and cost more in labor than they make in profit. They're popular, sure; but popularity doesn't pay the bills if the margins don't work.

You need to actually calculate what each dish makes you after food cost AND the labor to make it. When you find the losers, you've got options: raise the price, simplify the recipe, or feature something else.

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5. Inventory Shrinkage

Most operators tell me, "Yeah, we lose a bit to waste, but it's not that bad." Then we actually measure it, and it turns out they're losing 5-7% of everything that comes in the door.

Start with your expensive items. Do a physical count every day. Compare what you should have used based on sales to what's actually gone. When the numbers don't match, figure out why.

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Conclusion

Most operations can find 50,000 to 150,000 dirhams a year just by tightening up these five areas.

Pick one. Just one. Maybe it's the portions because that's the easiest to measure. Spend two weeks really paying attention to it. Fix what you find. Then move to the next.

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The restaurants that do this consistently? They're the ones still around in five years.

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