Restaurant people know that food cost and payroll are the two most significant expenses they have, but when restaurant owners turn into caterers, they have to be careful that these two expense areas do not cloud their vision. Here’s what happened to me:
Small job
In the midst of a busy day with 25 orders, a new customer from a large university called for a future delivery and ordered lasagna for 27 people. Now I’m going to, as I have done before, admit that we sold lots of Stouffer’s lasagna. It was reasonably priced, tasted OK, came frozen, cooked in 90 minutes, and was conveniently packed in aluminum half pans.
The customer had to feed 27 guests for dinner, so some quick math gave us the proper—we thought—product amount to send. We knew we could normally get nine nice slices of lasagna out of a half pan, so three pans would be perfect, right?
Miscalculations
When we wrote up the order, however, we were thinking 27 office workers who normally ate light lunches and not 27 hungry male college students. We were so busy we didn’t stop to think that 27 pieces of lasagna was maybe cutting it too close. I remember sort of agonizing over what we should do—send four pans and increase our cost by $11.87 and drive up our food cost, or stay within the percentages and send three pans?
Waste of time
I’m sure you can guess what happened. As soon as our driver left the delivery location, we got the call:
“How do you expect me to feed 27 starving boys with three tiny pans of lasagna, a small salad and a few pieces of garlic bread?”
As you can see, since the lasagna was improperly sized, the customer then thought that the whole order was made incorrectly. They did eat, they did pay, but we never heard from them again.
We succeeded in what?
We had managed to meet our percentage food cost goal, but that cost us a customer because frankly, we had violated the first rule of corporate catering: never make the customer look bad.
I certainly didn’t feel any better because I had an extra 12 bucks in my pocket and often thought of this admittedly stupid mistake.
Remember, you take money to the bank and not percentages.
Michael Rosman is a member of the Catersource consulting team. If you would like information about him coming to your business to address your specific needs, please email Carl Sacks at [email protected]. His book, Lessons Learned From Our Mistakes – and other war stories from the catering battlefield is available through the Catersource store.
You can visit Michael’s website at www.TheCorporateCaterer.com email [email protected].
