South African food prices increased at the fastest pace in almost 14 years in January, when the state power company intensified rolling blackouts.
Annual food and non-alcoholic beverage inflation quickened to 13.4% from 12.4% in December, Pretoria-based Statistics South Africa said Wednesday in a statement on its website. That’s the highest rate since April 2009, it said.
Furthermore, The South African Reserve Bank just raised its 2023 forecast for food-price inflation to 7.3% from 6.2%, with Governor Lesetja Kganyago warning that it could continue to surprise on the upside. Poultry, egg, and agriculture-industry bodies have said the power cuts are adding to food production costs.
The effect on restaurant menu prices is causing high price exhaustion among diners and restauranteurs alike.
But you can reduce the strain of all these factors by eliminating waste.
Food waste has been a constant for restaurant operators. In the past, large brands in the industry would build or purchase an expensive inventory system to decrease food waste. For smaller operators, inventory management was manual and required an experienced hand who could manage the art of efficient inventory ordering.
Technological advancements like POS platforms have successfully infiltrated front-of-house operations for years now, improving vastly the customer experience. Meanwhile, back-of-office operations have relied on slow but tried and true manual workflows involving the phone, mail, and even the fax to handle order forms and invoices. The back-of-house guru would use gut instinct, experience, and a good checklist or spreadsheet to keep everything running smoothly.
Back-of-house needs similar technology tools that benefit front-of-house to battle inflation.
Imagine implementing a system of inventory control that calculates in real-time, with each customer’s order from the menu, what’s left in inventory, and what’s short. With detailed reports, your next order will be precisely what you need from your suppliers. Eliminate over-ordering with easy-to-use software that your entire team can learn quickly.
Eliminate time-consuming manual ordering that often results in over-ordering and lost profits from food waste. With MarketMan.
MarketMan digitally connects your restaurant and your vendors, drastically reducing both food costs and inventory management time. Using an easy-to-learn cloud-based platform, MarketMan customers realize an average of 2-5% reduction in food costs within the first year.
Do the math. Could a 2% to 5% reduction in your yearly food costs help you battle 7.3% inflation and keep menu costs down? And keep customers coming back?
Additionally, added benefits from implementing the right back-of-house technology, evolving from time-consuming manual vendor management and invoicing tasks, can be impressive. MarketMan clients report an average boost in order efficiency by up to 50%. This increased efficiency, and time saved, are produced through an integrated ordering cloud platform that allows back-of-office managers to migrate seamlessly between multiple vendors and suppliers with no disruption. Instead of manually taking count on menu items that see an increase in orders or which beverage is most popular, MarketMan provides a digital solution that scratches back hours per day for operators to focus on other important tasks and responsibilities
In one digital location, through a powerful dashboard view, MarketMan eliminates the manual, often uncoordinated processes that can cause errors, consume vast amounts of time, and drain profits and margins.
More importantly, MarketMan customers gain deep insight into how inflation is affecting profits, and how decreasing food costs can counter inflation and higher menu prices.
For a demonstration of how convenient, cost-effective technology from MarketMan can help you battle the effects of high food costs and inflation, contact us today.
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