How to Improve Restaurant Efficiency

As a restaurant owner, you face various challenges, but one of the most important is surely how to improve restaurant efficiency.

To improve restaurant efficiency, you must focus on using technology to optimize processes and streamline operations, training staff, and ensuring good communication between front and back of house employees.

In this article, you will find valuable tips you can implement right now to boost restaurant performance:

Considering the rising costs, to make your business successful, you want to invest the least amount of money and get the most out of every penny. The same goes for efficiency. You must optimize the use of your resources to get the maximum output with minimum input.

Here are all the benefits you will enjoy if you focus on implementing solutions for how to improve restaurant efficiency:

• Decrease labor costs: once every restaurant process is optimized, you will be able to deliver great service with the least number of employees;
• Lower food costs: when you use ingredients efficiently and reduce food waste, you cut down on the overall cost used for food preparation;
• Increase table turnover: by increasing speed of service and communication, you can turn tables faster and serve more customers in a day;
• Have more happy customers: by providing fast and satisfactory service, you create the perfect dining out experience. Satisfied clients are more likely to leave positive reviews and recommend your business to others;
• Generate more revenue: by lowering costs and serving more customers you achieve the ultimate goal of increasing your profit.

It’s never too late to start working on how to improve restaurant efficiency. Follow these tips and you will soon see an improvement in the way your business is performing:

Sometimes, restaurant processes take longer because employees don’t know the exact scope of their responsibilities and what to do in certain situations. For example, what will one of your kitchen staff members do when they notice an ingredient has run out?

To increase restaurant efficiency, you must document every process at your restaurant and create a procedure for it. Here are a couple of examples:

• How to deal with unhappy customers;
• What is the dish washing process and who is responsible for it;
• What is the order in which every menu item should be plated.

As the central item of your restaurant, the menu can make or break your business. Here are some tips for menu optimization that will help you boost efficiency:

• Use the same ingredient for more dishes: to lower costs, incorporate the same ingredient in more dishes. Even better if you use seasonal ingredients as they are always cheaper;
• Use standardized recipes: when you have a strict recipe for each menu item and measure the ingredients each time, you ensure consistency in your food quality;
• Add allergen and nutritional information to the menu: prevent accidents and help customers choose the best dishes for their diet by clearly labeling menu items with allergens, specific diet and nutritional info. You can do it in a couple minutes, for free, using the online menu creator from GloriaFood.

This is how the allergens will show up in your menu once you publish the changes:

If you’re looking for more tips on how to improve restaurant efficiency, consider letting go of the old paper menus. Whenever you have to update it, you have to spend money and time on reprinting which takes your focus away from more important tasks.

In turn, opt for an online restaurant menu that you can update as many times as you want, for free. Moreover, you can make it available for on-location clients by enabling on-premises dining via QR code. Watch this video to see for yourself how simple and fast it can be:

How to improve restaurant efficiency? Get the best restaurant POS system from GloriaFood. With a fast and intuitive setup, it can help you:

• Speed up service: as the system is easy to use with fast RFID key card login and color-coded menu categories, employees can instantly input orders, accept payment and process returns with no delays;

• Reduce errors: you can say goodbye to misunderstood orders or orders that get lost on the way to the kitchen because as soon as a check is open in the POS, you can send it to the designated kitchen printer with just one tap;

• Accept contactless payment: increase client satisfaction by allowing clients to use their preferred payment method, be it credit or debit card, smartphone, or smartwatch;

• Manage staff: you can increase restaurant efficiency by assigning different responsibilities to employees and tracking every action taken on the POS system;

• Improve the front to back of house workflow: you can connect the POS system to multiple restaurant printers to speed up service. For example, you can have a printer at the salad bar and one at the pizza station.

Inventory problems can instantly hinder your restaurant’s efficiency. For example, you understock and run out of ingredients that only arrive in a couple of days. Or you overstock and end up practically throwing money away.

The best way to ensure proper stocking is to have a look over your restaurant data and notice over a longer period the quantity of each dish that gets ordered. This will help you have a better estimate when you place new stock orders.

You can get access to this data easily if you use the Reports module included in the GloriaFood POS system. You can also identify your best-selling dishes and worst-selling ones and update your menu to sell more.

Moreover, you can also use the POS system to set up the stock quantity for each menu item, so you stay on top of the inventory. When you run out of a specific menu item, it will automatically get marked as out of stock, so clients are not disappointed that they can’t order it.

Having to answer the phone during multiple other tasks will only make your employees’ jobs harder and more inefficient. Moreover, a lot of clients prefer to book restaurant tables without human interaction.

Therefore, another great answer to how to improve restaurant efficiency is to add a table reservation system to your website. You can get a free one from GloriaFood that only takes minutes to install.

It also comes with the pre-order function that enables customers to place orders and pay for them when they are making a reservation. This will help you provide faster service and increase table turnover.

Providing online orders is an important revenue stream, but if you want to have control over the process, you should stay away from third-party delivery apps. They can often have big taxes, and your restaurant can get lost in the sea of competitors.

Instead, provide clients with a great online ordering experience by adding the free online ordering system from GloriaFood to your website. It only takes 10 minutes, and you can start selling your food online by tonight.

Once installed, you also get access to a variety of bonus features, like:

• Reports module. You can use it to monitor your online ordering analytics and make informed decisions based on them.
• Autopilot module to send automated and personalized email marketing campaigns;
• Kickstarter module to get the word out about your business;
• Promotions module to encourage clients to spend more.

Before you start delving into how to improve restaurant efficiency, you must first identify what works for your restaurant and what doesn’t. By monitoring restaurant Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), you can easily find the areas of your business that need to be improved.

Here are some common restaurant KPIs:

• Costs of goods sold percentage = Costs of Goods Sold/Total Sales
• Inventory turnover = Net Sales/Average Cost of Inventory
• Labor cost percentage = (Labor Costs/Sales) x 100
• Overhead restaurant ratio = (Overhead Costs/Total Income) x 100
• Revenue per seat = Total Sales/Number of Covers

How to improve restaurant efficiency? Start with the people who are the engine of your business: your employees! If you want them to be as productive as possible, you must give them the necessary tools.

The best way to do so is through constant training. Here are some important topics you should cover:

• Your standard operating procedures;
• How to prepare and handle food safely;
• What is the acceptable uniform;
• How to prevent cross-contamination;
• How to use the POS system.

The good news is that if you use the GloriaFood POS system, you don’t have to worry about the POS training. The system includes a Training mode you can use to show new employees the ropes without affecting your real financials.

Simply enable Training mode during onboarding and disable it once they are ready to start using the POS for real transactions.

How to motivate restaurant staff to aid you in achieving your goal of efficiency? By offering them incentives based on performance! You can give out bonuses tied to KPIs such as table turnover, number of positive reviews or number of tables served.

You should also foster open communication between all members and have the restaurant manager give praise when they notice an employee is doing well. Even non-monetary gestures of good can make a difference.

Bad reviews can be demoralizing, but they can also include tips on how to improve restaurant efficiency. For example, if many clients complain that they wait a long time to be served, maybe you should schedule more employees.

By monitoring restaurant reviews and trying to solve the problems mentioned in them, you show customers you care about their opinion, and you are constantly trying to improve your business.

Once you’ve read all these tips on how to improve restaurant efficiency, it is time to implement them at your restaurant and enjoy the results. You can always rely on the GloriaFood ecosystem to be a great partner in boosting your restaurant’s performance.