Was chatting with my partner about our cheese costs (riveting, huh?) and was wondering to myself what others are spending on cheese per month. What percentage of your food cost is solely cheese?
30% is not an outrageous point. 25% would be better, obviously. In my experience, at least.
Cheese usage should be from 9% to 11%.
Take the dollar amt of cheese used at the end of the week
and divide it into your sales.
Then, to cement the fact of how important cheese portioning should be, divide the
amount of cheese used into your food cost. It should be around 30%.
This means that 30% of your pizza cost is in cheese.
For us last week, pizza cheese was:
7% of our total sales (including wings, salads, subs, bevgs)
21.7% of food+pop+paper cost
27.3% of food cost
Dan
No question that cheese is the biggest cost for a pizzeria. Portioning has saved us $$$$'s each year. We are buying 900lb’s a week and just the one cent per pound difference will save $9 so it’s not out of the question to ask our distributors to compete on price and then ask for a couple cents off that.
I appreciate all the feedback and advice, thanks! We are in the midst of implementing a cheese portioning protocol, (I know, shame on us for not having one in place from day one) and I wanted to see how far off base we are now that we don’t currently portion control. Since my partner is in the kitchen cooking all hours we are open, I think that has helped to off set what could potentially be a huge black hole of dollars nonetheless, every dollar we save goes straight into our pockets. Additionally, we are at the point in which we are hiring employees that aren’t family members and I know that we have to have cheese portioning down pat before we bring on anyone new. I’m looking forward to seeing those cheese costs go down and our profit go up! Thanks!