Two ways that cafe owners can minimise inventory wastage

Wastage of inventory can have a significant impact on a cafe owner's profits. If you run this type of business, here are two ways that you can minimise wastage of your inventory.

Monitor and adjust your stock levels

Cafes typically sell a lot of fresh goods that tend to spoil if they are not sold and consumed within a couple of days. If you order the ingredients for freshly-prepared products such as sandwiches, salads, and cakes, and a large percentage of these goods do not sell, these unsold items will spoil after a few days and will then need to be thrown away. This, in turn, will result in your business losing money.

As such, it is crucial to carefully monitor your sales figures and adjust the number of fresh ingredients you order from your suppliers accordingly, to ensure that you do not end up purchasing more than you can sell. One way to determine a rough estimate of how many sales you can expect during the coming month or so is to add up the last three months' sales figures and divide this by three to obtain the average number of sales you tend to make in a single month.

However, when making your calculations, you should also take into account how the current or upcoming season might increase or reduce your sales. For example, if your cafe is located in the middle of a popular tourist area, you might experience higher sales during the summer season (when most people go on holidays) and lower sales during the autumn and winter seasons.

Prepare for power outages

If you are ill-prepared for it, an electrical power outage of more than a few hours could end up costing you thousands of dollars (in the formed of destroyed inventory). This is because, as the temperatures in your cafe's non-functioning refrigerators and freezers begin to rise, bacteria will multiply on the fresh and frozen items being stored inside them, eventually resulting in these goods spoiling.

Given this, it is important to make sure that you are fully prepared for power outages. The best way to do this is to rent an electrical generator from a generator hire company in your local area. This equipment is able to transform kinetic energy (produced by its rotating components) into electrical energy and as such, can deliver power to your cafe's refrigerators and freezers even if the public electricity lines in your area stop working.

Whilst the cost of renting a generator might seem somewhat high, ultimately, this expense could save you thousands of dollars, by preventing your expensive inventory from spoiling. 


Share