Portion Guides and Cooks Menus

[Jason_Waywell]

So I am running into a bit of a wall as far as designing a new portion guide and cook menu. We are getting very close to our relaunch and i need to get these done.

My main problem is that we have 42+ specialty pizzas, and i need to list the builds for each of them. Ill attach a sample of the cooks menu. Is there a better way to do it than I have at the moment? Pizzas are in alphabetical order, and the ingredients are listed in the order they go on the pizza. Base sauces or anything that goes on before the bottom cheese are bolded, and any fresh ingredients that go on after the pizza is cooked are in italics. The owner wants some sort of graphical book thing, but I cant see the practicality of that. Having to flip through a book every pizza you make just doesnt make sense to me. But I do want to try and reach a midway point.

As far as the portion guide, I think I will group things with the same portioning together, so the crew and new employees dont have to navigate a spreadsheet. But any advice or examples are appreciated.

This is my first major management gig, and ive never really designed anything like this, so if they are completely terrible, just bear with me. I designed the portion guide and cooks menu my first month managing the restaurant. Ill also include one of my more recent procedural reference guides for comparison. Any help or advice is appreciated.

Thanks!
Jason

 

[durbancic]

Any thought of using a scale and just weighing or counting everything? I sure wouldn’t want to count 14 slices of mushrooms on a pizza. Plus, some parts of the shroom are larger, some smaller. Plus, scoops can be very inconsistent. I think the spreadsheet is good, have you tried color coding it to the type of topping GREEN pepper, BLACK olives, etc. (change the background that color).

Do you have tickets or makeline screen? You could consider having the ticket/screen show the ingredients on the pizzas, and do away with that chart.

 

[Patriot_sPizza]

with our pos (Point of Success) we list the ingredients, in the proper application order, on the make-line monitor…we weigh cheese, but freehand everything else…

 

[Jason_Waywell]

We use a scale to weigh our bottom cheese, but using a scale for each pizza is not exactly practical for how we operate. 2 people working on 4 pizzas at a time on the line for example. The “count” numbers are an average. I counted how many we put on a given pizza to make it look good, then I created the number from there. As far as costing and such, I randomly chose 14 mushroom slices, for example, weighed them out and repeated the process, then took the average weight for costing purposes.

Anyways, I realize scoops can be very inconsistent, but more accurate than freehand. I guess i will have to look into how we could use scales and still put out pizzas in a timely manner.

I will try color coding things, I didn’t think about that.

We use handwritten tickets currently (another issue I am dealing with), but will be getting a POS system with a makeline screen in the near future, and will have it act as you said, hopefully. If we have a system like Patriot’sPizza is speaking of, then i could do away with the cooks menu altogether. But the owner is the one dealing with the guys that will do our POS, so im not sure at the moment.