Motivation

 Determine your par stock, lead time for orders and shelf life of food items.

If you can project your consumption and lead time on certain items, you can order just enough and just in time. This avoids over stocking on items and hurting your credit or cash flow. This will also help you budget your expense allocation for cost of goods or food costs. Most importantly, this will minimize spoilage greatly.

 Always look for the best suppliers

Don't rely only one supplier. Australian market is very competitive and there are so many suppliers in the market. Competition is very acute and there are so many suppliers who are competing in the market based on price and quality. For example, they can offer you concessions and credit arrangements. That’s the way you can minimize the cost.

 Make sure that all food items consumed are accounted for

There is a possibility of pilferage, breakage and spoilage all the time. Make sure that you have a system to trace ingredients released to the kitchen to how much it was paid for by costumers. There are now soft wares and inventory systems that can do just that with less difficulty. Spoilages should be reported and items duly released by person in authority. Same should be done with breakages.

 Have a buffer

Allow a 10-20% mark up on your selling price for any unfavorable eventualities. So that you have an allowance if competition pushes you to reduce prices. However, if this is not possible, especially in price-sensitive food categories, it would be best to make sure that costs are spent where they should be.

Answer to Question no 4

Seafood purchased by a restaurants or retail stores for on-selling to consumers, must be safe and with sufficient quality to ensure it will not spoil during expected storage times. HACCP is very important in terms of Seafood and there are few critical control pints to receipt and storage of seafood to be food hygiene.