Food & Beverage Cost Control

Food Cost % = (Beginning Inventory + Purchases - Ending Inventory) / Food Sales. Weekly inventory audits and portion control keep margins healthy.

Keep beverage cost percentage between 18% and 24% for spirits/wine and 20% to 25% for draft beer. Conduct weekly bottle counts to eliminate unrecorded comps and spillage.

Kitchens run yield tests on meat and seafood to know the true usable weight after trimming, boning, and prepping — a whole fish or a primal cut always loses weight in butchery, and pricing a dish off the raw purchase weight instead of the trimmed yield weight silently erodes margin on every plate.