Stock control is the discipline of knowing what came in, what went out and what should still be on the shelf, so that the gap reveals waste, theft, over-portioning or plain mistakes. The core tools are unglamorous: regular stocktakes on a consistent day, FIFO rotation, par levels for ordering, waste logs and delivery checks against invoices. In bars, wet stock audits compare what the tills say was sold against what has left the cellar, line by line. The headline number is theoretical against actual GP: if costed recipes promise one margin and the stocktake delivers a lower one, the difference is money walking out of the building.
Modern systems link recipes, supplier prices and the POS so variance shows up weekly rather than after a painful weekend of spreadsheets. But software only works if recipes are kept current and deliveries are booked in properly. A clean, labelled, organised store room is itself a control, because chaos hides everything.
What we ask on the show
- What does your stocktake ritual look like, and who actually does it?
- Where have you found the biggest leaks between theoretical and actual GP?
- How do you get chefs and bartenders to care about waste logs?
- Has stock software genuinely saved you time, or just moved the pain around?