Portion Control

Why bother with portion control? Well, do you like money? I do, and I like to keep as much of it as I can. Implementing a straightforward and concise portion control program can save you tens of thousands of dollars! Tens of thousands of dollars that you already have and are letting slip through your fingers and right out the door in front of you. Right at this very moment pizzas are walking out your door with too much on them. Pizzas loaded down with your cash!

The chances are that right now in your restaurant you have about four different types of offenders who are over portioning your pizzas.

• The Artist: This particular pizza maker is for certain that every pizza they make is a beautiful work of art. They are determined to make every pizza their own personal creation. Even though you have personally shown this employee exactly how much cheese, sausage, and pepperoni they should be putting on every pizza, there are no written guidelines or charts to follow, so they follow their artistic inspiration. Every pizza they make is different than the last and every pizza they make certainly doesn’t have the correct amount of toppings on it. You probably have at least one of these guys in your shop.
• Clueless: Food is cheap, right? Cheese is like, what, 50 cents a pound or something, right? Or so thinks Mr. Clueless. This is one of your typical employees who thinks because you are a restaurant you get everything cheap, everything is a “tax write-off, ” and businesses make a ton of money anyway. This is the guy who scrapes all the cheese out of the catch pan into the trash instead of back into the cheese bin. This is the guy who likes to “load up” the pizzas the way he would like to have them made. How many of these guys are working for you right now?

• The Regular Joe: This is an average guy just like you and me, the high school kid starting his first job, or the new hire who wants to work hard and impress the boss. This is the guy who would love to make a pizza the right way. This guy wants to make a perfect pizza, and he wants to make the pizza that you want him to make. But, he can’t. The key employee that you have training him showed him one way, you showed him another, and then the manager showed him yet another way. So, his pizzas are not what you want going out your door either. These are the bulk of the portion offenders that you have working for you.
• Yes, lastly we have you. The worst offender of them all. If you are free throwing toppings on your pizzas, then I can guarantee that you are either over portioning or under portioning your pizzas 99% of the time too. It is impossible for any pizza guy, cook, chef or whoever to free throw any toppings and get it 100 percent correct – 100% of the time. Worst of all you are setting a bad example for all of your other staff members. Now I know what you are thinking, “I have been doing this for 35 years, and I can put 10 oz. of cheese on a 16″ pizza every – single – time.” Well, I am sorry to burst your bubble, but… You can’t.

So is your staff to blame for you losing money on over portioned pizzas, subs, salads, desserts, draft beers, wines, etc.? Absolutely not. Most of the time your staff is not over-portioning or under-portioning on purpose or with malicious intent. It is just a simple systems failure.

Sure you can tell someone how much cheese goes on a large pizza, and you can show them a thousand times, but this time they might be throwing 10.9 ounces on this pizza, 12 ounces on the next, or worse yet, they are only putting 8 ounces on the next one.

Let’s say that right now you are paying $2.50 per pound for whole milk mozzarella, and you make about 4,000 pizzas per month at your pizzeria. If you happen to put one ounce too much on every pizza, the cost to your bottom line would be $625 per month or $7,500 per year – just in cheese!

So, how can they be sure to get it right every single time and stop wasting your money? It’s straightforward really – a portion control program. Putting together a portion control program for your operation can be as simple or as complicated as you want, but the basics are always the same.

1. Information: You need to give the employee the information that they need. This can be portion charts on the make line or recipe books at prep stations. Just make sure it is printed and in plain sight. The staff needs to know that 8 oz. is what is expected on that 14” pizza, and they need to be able to look it up immediately.
2. Tools: Now that your staff knows your portions, they need the tools to ensure they are putting on the right amounts. Tools like digital scales and measuring cups need to be in use at all times.
3. Monitoring: Now that you have trained your staff on how much of what goes on each item and given them to tools to get it done, you need to make sure they are doing it. Of course, a close eye on a busy night will tell you who is following the rules and who is not, but you can take it one step further with your POS. Taking advantage of the inventory module and portion control features of your POS will allow you to keep an eye on your inventory and measure how close your staff is coming to hitting your portion goals.

Portion control is straightforward and easy, and believe it or not; your employees will grow to like it. It takes the guessing out of their job, it makes training easier, and they may just get a boss who is in a better mood.