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Practical Ways to Reduce Food Waste, Improve Quality & Elevate Kitchen Productivity

Get Your Dishwashers More Involved… Keeping your staff busy and on schedule for tomorrow's prep work is the first place to focus on cutting prep costs. Regardless of your restaurant's concept, involving dishwashers is a smart move.

Approached like a mentoring project, many hardworking and dedicated dishwashers can move into prep jobs. They can perform all the busy work that puts prepready items into a skilled cook's hands. Peeling garlic,shallots, onions, carrots and potatoes are just a few possible duties. Preparing celery and spinach, de-veining shrimp, cleaning squid and scrubbing clams are others. These are the kinds of tasks that can be delegated to the dish crew with a minimal amount of training.

The key is to keep your highest-paid cooks from wasting time. Get products into their hands in a usable form. Nothing should make a chef crazy faster than watching a $20 (or more) -an-hour sauté cook peel onions. Keeping ample amounts of ready-to-use mirepoix in the walk-in always keep cooks at the stove.

Delineate prep duties ahead of time for all station cooks throughout the shift. Certain items are better than others for prepping during service. Almost every restaurant has an off night when business is slow, or finds itself with some down-time before the rush. This is quality time for small, easy-to-perform projects to keep idle hands busy. Every station has some simple prep that can be picked up throughout the shift. Picking herbs, slicing garlic, preparing vegetables, or juicing lemons are all examples of duties that keep cooks busy.

Stay away from time and temperature-sensitive tasks like slicing fish or making vinaigrette or chores that require clean- up. Keep prep lists typed and organized at each station and for each shift. It will help cooks and prep cooks prepare only what is needed. The prep list should be an updated order and inventory spreadsheet. Pars set for each item serves several purposes. They prevent staff from over-prepping items to get ahead-; they save time and money; and they keep product at its peak for final cooking.

As cooks leave their station, they should fill out the prep list, taking inventory of what's on hand and what is needed for the next shift. Adjust pars on the prep list for both busy and slower times. Help your team members focus and learn what amount of product is needed for a Monday versus Friday. An organized team member won't waste time figuring out what to do and will dive right into the day's cutting and chopping.

Finally, don't forget to train dishwashers in food safety techniques before they assume prep duties. This includes proper hand sanitation.

Waste Not, Want Not…

Prepared vegetables often leave a bounty of fresh trimmings that are perfect for the soup pot. Vary your soup offerings to take advantage of your vegetable purchases.

In the spring, the peelings and ends of asparagus marry well with the addition of ginger peelings. Crisp fried tortilla chips tossed with a touch of soy adds an inexpensive tasty crunch.

Staying in close contact with your produce purveyor can result in savings for soups. A case of overripe tomatoes will make an easy batch of tomato bisque. Adding a slice of toasted day-old bread slathered with some puréed avocado or melted goat cheese with roasted garlic, and the selling price easily goes up a buck. When cauliflower has brown spots it lends itself to the soup pot as well. Toss the cauliflower with a little olive oil and some sweet Madras curry, cooked with chicken stock and puréed with some cream. This low-cost soup is made special with a grilled shrimp or a timbale of sautéed brunoise vegetables.

Fish scraps saved and frozen from butchering portions for service go straight to the bottom line. For homemade fish stock, ask your fishmonger for whitefish bones (e.g. halibut, grouper, bass, etc.) If your relationship is solid, they should come free, as fish purveyors routinely throw them away. Fish stocks are quick and cheap to make, and fish soups and stews are always good sellers. Since the shelf life of fish soups is short, freeze portions for future use or use them for staff meals, helping keep costs in line as well.

The key with soup is watching for quality ingredients that get overlooked or even thrown away. A quick training tip for new prep cooks or line cooks is to make them save every scrap as they set up for their shift. Before service, shift through the saved food, explaining to them along the way what's usable and why. When your staff can differentiate between trash and treasure, you won't spend as much time looking in the garbage for their waste.

Fine-tune Prep Work by Day Part

The definition of efficient prep work changes by day part. The basics are the same for each meal, but to really cut costs you need to look at the specific challenges of breakfast, lunch and dinner service.

Turn and burn for efficient breakfast service. If an operation serves breakfast or brunch, speed is always essential for guest satisfaction. Keeping tables turning is especially important for lower-check-average day parts like breakfast. Certain kitchen tricks are necessary to turn and burn,- maintaining quality and keeping guests satisfied. In high-volume operations, prepared items like liquid eggs that can be poured into a waiting omelet pan can save measurable man-hours in cracking eggs. Pre-shredded cheeses eliminate the fuss of setting up and cleaning food processors. Products that you only have to reach for save the short-order cook time and keep finished plates flying out of the kitchen.

Prepared foods like scoop-and-bake muffin mixes help save time. Likewise for the increasingly high-quality, par-baked artisan breads, which are available in many flavors and sizes. High-quality, thick, crusty, fresh bread adds value to many morning menu items. Breakfast sandwiches and grilled Paninis (a type of bread) get an added value lift from high- quality breads. Because these breads are at their best on the day they are baked, the remaining loaf or two make excellent fresh croutons for the afternoon lunch soup or salad.

Other breakfast tips include cutting ingredients as small as possible to keep morning sauté items and omelets buzzing out of the pan. Smaller items heat faster and keep pick-up times down. Also, blanch and shock green vegetables in well-salted water before service. Broccoli, green beans, and zucchini all favor a short bath before cooking. Roasting mushrooms before service also picks up the pace in the pan, along with adding another level of flavor to a morning omelet favorite. Buy pre-sliced button mushrooms, and in a preheated roasting pan use some good-quality olive oil, sliced garlic, fresh thyme sprigs and salt and pepper. Roast them in a high-heat oven for 8-10 minutes.

Make use of yesterday's dinner protein leftovers for this morning's hash special. Prime rib translates into roast beef hash, a sure sellout brunch item. Those salmon scraps from the Saturday butcher work right into griddled salmon cakes. Use your crab cake recipe and substitute fresh salmon that has been lightly pulsed in the food processor. Ideas like these add a fresh look to your specials card and black ink to your profit-and-loss statement.

For lunch service, sandwiches and salads are still lunch menu leaders. But sandwich fillings continue to get more involved and complex as chefs incorporate more imagination between slices of bread. Cost becomes a greater concern with better-quality meats and cheeses rolling off the slicer. For cost control and speed, pre-portion meat-and-cheese parings and wrap them individually, maintaining set pars to prevent over-portioning.

If your kitchen is using high-quality par-baked breads, allow them to cool first, then pre-slice and wrap the bread, using the first sliced for grilled and panini pressed sandwiches. Again, slices that are left over can be used for croutons, breadcrumbs or stuffing mixes. Use your menu mix and sales history to set pars as accurately as possible, minimizing waste.

Other Productivity Tips:

Sliced tomatoes should always be stored in slotted pans for service and storage, allowing the water to separate from the fruit, extending the shelf life and keeping sandwiches from getting soggy.

Keep sandwich spreads in large squeeze bottles for neatness and speed, and keep ready at hand filled backups for service. Buying prewashed mixed greens keeps pantry cooks with salad-ready greens at hand; but you should consider mixing in chopped romaine to extend the mix with crunchy green lettuce.

Mix creative ingredients into mayonnaise or mustards to add zip to sandwich spreads. Fresh chopped herbs like tarragon and rosemary marry well in Dijon mustard, with a touch of honey. Purée avocado and roast tomato into homemade or quality store-bought mayonnaise for a tasty touch on good bread.

Chile-ginger pickles add punch to a sandwich of hoisin-soy roasted chicken. New garlic dills add fresh- ness and zing to the classic Rueben plate. Customers notice the limp pickle that graces most lunch sandwiches, and those little things can cost you repeat visits.

Finally, don't let dinner become a big waste. Dinner is the bread and butter of most upscale operations. It's also the service with the biggest room for waste. Controlling costs is most important with the evening meal because the raw food cost is highest. Primal meat cuts, fresh fish, shrimp and scallops are all big-ticket items before they even reach the guest.

Watch your menu mix carefully every night. Items that your guests aren't ordering may need to be reworked or removed. This information should help dictate the amount of product ordered and prepped. This is especially important during menu changes, when new items are first introduced to your customer. Careful tracking of items sold gives you the information to make quick decisions before an item or items take a bite out of your food cost.

If you run a kitchen that makes its own veal stock for sauces, consider cutting the bone mix with beef neck bones. At half the cost, they offer plenty of rich flavors. The only setback is that they do not have much gelatin. Add a couple of split pig trotters to the stock to make up for the loss. After the primary stock is made, save the bones and add fresh mirepoix and make a secondary stock. This stock doesn't have the weight for sauces, but is perfect for soups and broths.

Dinner bread is one of the kitchen's biggest challenges. If you work with a bakery and receive daily deliveries, create a moving par. Set your daily bread pars, and work closely with your bakery, seeing that you are allowed to slide your next day order up or down the night before. Even making small changes on a nightly basis will add up to real savings, and keeps unwanted bread out of the freezer or trash can.

Taking the time to rewrap and ice fish at the end of each day is a pain, to be sure. But proper storage can add days to the shelf life of fish. Make the investment in the correct storage pans allowing for drainage of melting ice and a suitable amount of ice to last until the next shift begins.

In large and small operations, restaurants are increasing their reliance on their fishmonger to pre-portion fish. If an operation does not have a proper cutting area or the skilled hands to butcher fish, portion-ready fish is easy to cost and is without waste. Popular cuts like salmon and halibut are ordered to specification just like beef tenderloin filets.

When building your menu, avoid out-of-season items that are expensive, such as asparagus, strawberries and citrus. Try to be as seasonal as your concept allows. When building your menu, avoid items that are expensive and/or lacking quality when out of season. Use items such as asparagus, strawberries and citrus at the peak of their flavor and when their cost is lowest.

In the end, prep and labor savings are all around. Rally the staff and always trumpet the message that wage increases and bonuses are tied to efforts that cut waste and save on labor.