Insight
Why stock goes missing between the store room and the plate
Most kitchens do not lose stock in one dramatic event. It leaves quietly, in portions, and only the totals notice.
5 min read
Ask an owner where their stock goes and the honest answer is usually a shrug. Deliveries are counted on arrival, the kitchen cooks, the dining room fills, and at the end of the month a number appears that does not match the food that was sold.
The gap is rarely theft. It is the accumulation of ordinary decisions made under pressure: a portion served generously, a tray left out too long, a substitution nobody wrote down, a prep batch cooked for a service that never got busy.
The three places the trail breaks
In practice, the record of what actually happened breaks in the same three places in almost every restaurant we sit in.
- At the point of ordering, when modifications and comps are agreed verbally and never make it into any record.
- At the pass, when a dish is remade and the original portion is discarded without being counted as waste.
- In prep, when yield differs from the assumption behind the recipe — the same 100kg of chicken does not always break down the same way.
Why monthly counts cannot fix it
A stock count tells you the size of the hole, not where it is. By the time the count happens, the service that caused the variance is weeks gone and nobody can reconstruct it.
What changes behaviour is a smaller loop: knowing on the day that a line is moving faster than the orders behind it justify, while the people who worked that service are still in the building.
What to do this week
You do not need new software to start. You need one honest record of three things.
- Write down every remake and every comp, with the reason, for two weeks.
- Weigh the yield on your three highest-cost proteins instead of trusting the recipe card.
- Compare what the kitchen prepped against what the dining room sold, per service rather than per month.
Ordena exists because that loop is difficult to keep by hand during service. When ordering, kitchen operations and stock share one record, the variance stops being a monthly surprise and becomes a question you can answer the same evening.
Keep reading
Guide
How to read a service instead of a monthly report
Reports describe the past. A service can be read while you can still change its outcome. Here is what to watch, and when.
Note
What to fix before you buy any restaurant software
Software makes an existing process faster. If the process is undefined, the software simply produces confusion at speed.