Of the estimated one million tonnes of food waste generated by restaurants annually, 34% comes from unfinished dishes. Plate waste, as its commonly known, is a long-standing issue that, together with inefficient food prep and spoilage, costs restaurants more than £3 billion each year. And the main culprit is portion size.

Why do Restaurants Serve Large Portions?

While serving large portions practice is often the result of lax prep or poor oversight, some restaurants operate under the assumption that their patrons associate quantity with value for money. While this is certainly the case for family and casual dining restaurants, in the health-conscious, eco-minded UK, customers are now more influenced by other value perceptions such as dietary diversity and ingredient quality.

The True Cost of Oversized Portions

Churning out stacked dishes can be a very costly practice on multiple levels. Larger portions require larger quantities of ingredients which in turn, require larger purchase orders. When the ingredients aren’t fully consumed, your restaurant’s cost per serving increases, driving up your total cost of goods sold. And when food goes unused, you incur a direct loss on the purchase price of those ingredients.

Therefore, reducing portion size has the potential to dramatically cut back on plate waste and help you achieve significant cost savings. But it’s a strategy that needs to be planned carefully in order to balance cost efficiency with customer satisfaction. Generally speaking, there’s a minimum of five steps that you should follow:

1. Identify High-Waste, Low-Margin Dishes
2. Adjust and Test Your Changes In-House
3. Price Your Updated Dishes
4. Create Specific Prep Guidelines
5. Unveil Your Dishes, Monitor and Refine

1. Identify High-Waste, Low-Margin Dishes

The first step is to log dishes that are frequently left unfinished or which generate high waste, also noting the ingredients that are consistently left on the plate. The best way to keep track is by collecting observational data from servers and customer feedback.

It's then critical to identify your best and worst performing dishes. Try to avoid making reductions to high-demand items, at least initially. Instead, pinpoint high-waste, low-margin dishes that are easier to adjust without compromising your customers’ value perception.

To determine low-margin dishes with excess waste potential, conduct a cost analysis of every ingredient for each menu item to work out cost per serving. Then subtract this from the item’s selling price.

2. Adjust and Test Your Changes In-House

Deciding on the extent of your dish downsizing requires you to balance customer expectation with cost savings. With all going well, you’ll have gathered precise customer and staff feedback that provides reliable information about the amount of leftover food for each target dish

Once you’ve decided on your target reductions, have your chefs prepare and present the updated dishes for tasting and presentation tests, preferably with your servers and kitchen staff.

From their feedback, make any required adjustments before introducing the dishes to guests. To test the water, consider introducing them as lunch portions. You could also present the smaller version as a default item and include the original dish as a ‘supersized’ option. This will subtly shift your customers’ expectations towards smaller dishes without excluding the larger alternative.

3. Price Your Updated Dishes

Setting the right prices for your updated dishes is a delicate process that requires careful menu management. Get it wrong and you’ll undermine the entire process. Whether or not to change prices depends on the actual cost savings vs customer satisfaction.

In some cases, customers will want a corresponding price reduction if dish portion sizes are noticeably smaller, particularly with regards value-conscious customers who frequent causal and family dining establishments.

Should reducing the portion size of a dish result in significant savings on ingredient costs, you’re obviously going to have more room to scale down in price.

On the other hand, if you’ve taken the brave step of reducing portions on your signature dishes, your customers may be willing to pay the original price. This is providing of course, that the quality and presentation remains the same.

It’s also worth bearing in mind that smaller portions can encourage your guests to add extra sides to compensate, be it an appetiser or dessert. So retaining the original dish price would make sense in this instance.

4. Create Specific Prep Guidelines

Your kitchen staff are going to play a crucial role in ensuring the consistency and quality of your updated dishes. They should be able to easily access the adjusted recipes and dish guidelines, ideally from a centralised recipe management system that provides key data about the ingredients, quantities, measurements and preparation steps.

Putting such a system in place is also going to help with presentation – this becomes ever more important when working with smaller portions. As well as looking visually appealing, reduced portions will need to look well proportioned. For the sake of consistency, specific, centralised guidelines should therefore be in place, especially if you run a multi-store operation.

5. Unveil Your Dishes, Monitor and Refine

To gauge the impact of your streamlined dishes, encourage servers to engage directly with diners and consider adding comment cards to each table. To further highlight your changes and to collect more feedback, set up a social media campaign.

It’s obviously going to be of critical importance to monitor the performance of your dishes. So you’ll need access to accurate and reliable sales data, preferably by way of a comprehensive restaurant analytics suite. You should be able to track pre and post-introduction sales to determine if the new changes have had a positive or negative impact on customer demand.

If you’ve decided to offer both standard and downsized versions, the ability to compare the performance of both is going to prove extremely helpful. Additional metrics such as total spend per customers and add-on sales will also help to provide a clearer picture of the impact of your new, streamlined dishes. With this kind of data to hand, you’ll be able to make adjustments where required.

Don’t forget the impact on your inventory either. The introduction of smaller dishes will change ingredient usage patterns which, in turn, affects ordering volume. Some of the latest restaurant management systems can really help in this regard by automatically updating purchasing according to changes made at both dish and ingredient level.

Final Thoughts

In conclusion, serving smaller portion sizes is going to help you align your restaurant more closely with customer preferences which are now shifting towards health-conscious dining. In a challenging climate of increasing competition and rising food prices, it’s a strategy that can ensure that your restaurant remains financially resilient, customer-centric and relevant.

The Syrve Solution

Concerned about your restaurant’s portion sizes? Syrve provides you with all the tools you need to streamline and improve your dishes including:

• Full Portion Control, Easy Optimisation
• Automated Prep Plans
• Comprehensive Menu and Pricing Management
• Comprehensive Analytics Suite
• Centralised Recipe Management System
• Automated Inventory Control

Learn more: https://www.syrve.com