Strong controls regarding product complaints, product specifications and recipe adherence to the specifications can contribute to cost savings for your business.
Managing product complaints and identifying trends allows for immediate visibility to act quickly before it’s too late. Serving poor quality food negatively impacts the guest experience and discourages them from re-visiting your restaurant. Serving unsafe food can cause product recalls and brand-damaging media attention. Identifying product and supplier trends based on a supplier scorecard will help your company make better business decisions for future purchases.
Having the correct specifications for products being served will allow your business to get supplier bids with the goal of receiving the best possible cost.
Take the opportunity to review your product specifications with a cost savings approach. For example, look for areas of product waste, whether the product is proprietary and necessary, whether barrier or non-barrier film is used, and if growing regions and types of processing equipment are limited.
The product development and the quality teams should work together to ensure product specifications align with recipes. If the amount of product pieces in a case is not correct, this would impact the number of servings which contributes to waste. If you create products from scratch and you are not using all of the product in the case then you are creating waste. Product specifications can be adjusted as needed which could contribute to cost savings.
NSF can manage your processes to help ensure product quality and safety are met which can contribute to a reduction in waste, resulting in cost savings.
Author: Betsy Kaesontae is the Manager for the Supplier Management Services team at NSF providing outsourced services that help companies manage the food safety and quality of their supply chain. You can reach her at bkaesontae@nsf.org
This post is one in a series on managing the quality and food safety of a supply chain as a manufacturer, restaurant brand or foodservice company.
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