Reduce your costs AND improve quality?

Growing restaurant chains often look for ways to reduce their food costs. Large, successful restaurant chains don't just try to reduce their food costs, they try to reduce their food and labor costs while also improving the quality and consistency of their food products simultaneously. This is can be a tall order.

It seems to be a natural inclination to think that you have to sacrifice quality or value to reduce the cost of a product, but this is simply not true. The most successful restaurant chains are actually very good at this, it is part of the reason they are so successful. They don't simply try to cut their food costs, they try to cut the food cost and labor costs while making no concessions in their food quality or consistency. These successful restaurant chains have learned that you don't have to do one or the other, you can do both.

One of our clients, a large successful restaurant chain with hundreds of locations, is always very keen on reducing costs without sacrificing a bit of quality. They contacted us at Epicures Inc. because they were having a little bit of trouble with their pasta. They wanted to reduce their food and labor expenses for their pasta, but they felt there was very little that could be done to reduce their costs without giving up some quality and consistency.

Our client serves many pasta dishes so they are constantly preparing pasta in their kitchens. They have refined their pasta preparation processes to near perfection, and yet they still experience problems. The consistency of the pasta varies too much, it is often too soft or too hard. The portions vary too much, every dish seems to contain a little more or less pasta than it should. There is constant waste because pasta is regularly thrown out if it sits too long and gets too soft. They spend a lot of time preparing pasta because it must be made as needed, and they need it a lot.

Our client wanted some sort of inexpensive, fast cooking pasta in perfect portion size pouches that would cook quickly and perfectly every time with no waste and no variations in the portions or quality. The pasta also needed to be fantastic, they did not want to sacrifice the quality of their dishes at all. We did our best to give them exactly what they wanted.

One of our manufacturing partners had a state of the art facility that could produce excellent pasta in easy to use single serving packages, carefully prepared in computer controlled systems that would cook every serving to perfection with no variance in consistency or quality. The pasta was carefully prepared and packaged, and then frozen in a particular process that preserved the quality and consistency of the pasta perfectly. Our client could now use these single serving packages to produce perfect pasta as ordered, very quickly, in perfect portions without any waste at all.

Our client was very surprised. They had never considered that their pasta could be prepared and frozen for use on demand in such a manner that provided the taste, texture, and quality they required. We were able to provide our client with a solution that reduced the food and labor costs, reduced the time and work required, and also actually improving the consistency and quality of the pasta, while also eliminating all of the associated waste. This was accomplished with a simple phone call, and some free help from us at Epicures Inc.

It can be a difficult task just to reduce the food cost associated with a particular product. It can seem like an impossible task to reduce the food cost, labor cost, associated waste, and preparation time of a product while also increasing its quality and consistency. This seemingly impossible task can actually be accomplished with relative ease if you have a friend in the business that does this sort of thing all the time. At Epicures Inc., this is what we do for a living. Give us a call, we would love to help.

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