Food waste in professional environment

How much food "waste" is considered "normal" in a professional kitchen?

I'm not completely inexperienced here. Used to work for a company that ran a string of culinary schools, every one of which has a teaching establishment associated with it. When the CA BOE came in to do a sales tax audit on our gross sales they tried nailing us based on the amount of raw materials purchased vs what was sold.

Ummm...it's a cooking school - there is going to be more waste than normal. I had statistics from the national restaurant association (20+ years ago) that showed the average amount of "waste" was at about 30% in a standard restaurant. Waste for purposes of the audit was defined as anything that didn't generate a cash sale , so it included staff meals, spoilage, donated inventory, as well as incorrectly prepared product.

Our school restaurants averaged about 60% waste, which I thought was pretty decent all things considered.

So fast forward to today where I'm asked this questions by someone managing a private dining club (he knows of my prior "experience"). He won't tell me what the waste amount is, but was wondering what was the culinary schools' baseline.

I told him what I knew, which is seriously out of date. I suggested he contact the NRA to see if they have stats as well.

But I'm curious what you folks see.

Does this include trim/yield loss from prep and cooking?

Yes.

Shouldn't trim/yield loss be factored into the ultimate sale price of the product? And thus not be waste?

Edit: To clarify, if you're cooking mince which is , say, 20% fat you're going to base your sale price based on 100% of the cost of the mince, not the 80% which is left after the fat has cooked off.

Likewise if you're trimming steaks, your sale price will be based on the cost to you, not how much is left after you trim it.

Our waste log includes product that could have been sold but was disposed of instead. For example, a beef tenderloin costs approx $80. Trimmed and portioned it will yield approx 10 nice filet. The prep scrap, approx 20%, is not waste. An unsold steak, due to exceeding shelf life, spoilage, send back or stoned line cook chowing down, is waste. Of course not all waste is recorded - it's the stoned line cook 's job to do so.:cool2:

I've been taught something like:

Food cost - Wastage = Yield

Yield being how many portions you get out of it and/or how much you put on each plate.
A general rule is that food costs should be about 30% of the price the customer pays. Any higher than that and things begin losing their profitability.

There are some foods with really low yield, so the wastage will depend on your choice of ingredients (among other things).

Depends on the establishment . You would be amazed at the waste in very high tiered joints. I worked at a 2 star in Chicago. Whole ducks would be roasted and we served the center cut from each breast and trashed the rest of the duck. However your average joint normally runs a tight ship, profit margins be verrrry small in restaurants

This can be a very tricky number to nail down. If you take a Pork shoulder and remove the bone and excess fat to make sausage you have a yield number that can give you a food cost for the sausage that accounts for the 'waste'. When you turn around and use the bone to make a stock and render the fat to cook vegetables and use these to make a sauce you have to make a choice when costing the sauce as to whether or not the 'waste' ingredients carry any costs as ingredients. Will there always be enough 'waste' to cover your production needs? If not, do you assign a cost based on the commodity price of replacing the 'waste' item from a vendor or do you assign a fractional value based on your own yield from the original pork shoulder?

It's not a super fun game to play. Your 30% waste number from the NRA is 30% of what? Purchases or sales? Either way it seems odd to me. I guess my point is that there are many ways to account for waste and like Dave stated reporting accuracy is often way off. Where you might be able to point at industry wide general benchmarks for labor or food cost I think waste numbers would likely be all over the place.

here is a good number for you': a **** ton

I've seen a lot of chefs aim for 30% food cost and 1/3 of that as wastage overall, but at the last place we had strict limits on wastage so a lot of stuff went into stocks, staff food, or the chiller. So wastage as a proportion of total ingredients in the door worked out about 4/5% of food in the door. Saw a lot of ingenious ways to beat the wastage bug, including pureed pods from beans/peas ect. for soups, and the fatty pork and beef ends being cooked off into lard.

U crack me up brother! Gotta love 'da truth' - so WORD!

panda said:

here is a good number for you': a **** ton

Click to expand...

Ok. Thanks for the responses. Obviously I'm an amateur as is the manager. Thing is the head chef was caught stealing product. He had kinda admitted to that so he lost his job
They are just trying to figure if they should bring charges. I don't think the records are good enough.

The manager (who is not the same as my friend) I think is incompetent. I don't think they can build a.case.