In the restaurant industry, it can be incredibly difficult to make a profit. In fact, 1/3 of all new restaurants fail almost immediately, and the vast majority of restaurants barely scrape by with enough profit to stay open.
This is largely due to the industry having such a tight profit margin. Between the cost of ingredients, employees, and necessary overhead, along with the growing need to keep food prices down, it’s hard to make a profit.
Luckily, there is something that can help you take your restaurant out of the slumps and into the realm of profitable growth without any magic tricks or schemes; you just need to crunch the numbers properly.
This is where restaurant data analytics come in.
What is Restaurant Data Analytics?
To understand this, you need to break it into two sections. The data and the analytics part.
Your restaurant data is a lot more than you think. Obviously, it encompasses how many customers are coming in, how much food you’re preparing each day, and how much money you’re making, but it goes far deeper than that. In fact, if you break it down enough, you can figure out exactly how much of a single ingredient you’re using or wasting in a single hour, along with the fine details about how that’s impacting your bottom line. Your restaurant data is a deep set of statistics that go far beneath the surface that you’re probably used to dealing with.
Then, you have the analytical part. This is what you do with that data once you’ve recorded it. You take what is essentially just a long list of seemingly meaningless numbers, and you turn them into something tangible that you can work with.
At the end of the day, that’s what restaurant data analytics is all about; recording real information regarding the most intricate details of your business, analyzing them to discover what they really mean, and then using that to take action.
How Does Restaurant Data Analytics Drive You Toward Profit?
This is the part that benefits you the most. Yes, actually engaging in data analytics, at least if you do it the traditional way, is incredibly difficult. However, it can take your struggling restaurant and make it profitable relatively easily.
This is because the entire point is to optimize the way you’re running your restaurant. The best way to highlight this is with an example.
Let’s say that you start your pre-opening routine by preparing all your cold ingredients for the day. You have a general idea of what dishes are most popular, and you try to have your prep reflect that without cutting it so close that you run out and have to disrupt the kitchen mid-shift.
Sounds great, right? Except, you don’t take into account how many people substitute certain ingredients out, which ones lose their freshness halfway through the day and need to be replaced, and other factors that generate waste.
That is all a cut to your profit, and most restaurant owners don’t pick up on how those small wasteful actions damage their growth.
With restaurant data analytics, you get to see that firsthand, and you learn how to adapt your daily practices to prevent that from happening.
Adopt Restaurant Data Analytics to Save Your Restaurant
Good food and amazing service go a long way toward profitability, but if you don’t handle the small details, those things won’t work. Restaurant data analytics can solve that.
However, many restaurant owners neglect their analytics due to the difficulty of sifting through so much complex data. Luckily, Fox Metrics can help. We can provide you with real-time analytical reports that turn your data into tangible information you can use to optimize your business and grow.