Inflation is at a 40 year high.

The Consumer Price Index (CPI), calculated monthly by U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, pinpoints what people pay for goods and services. Recently, the CPI numbers for the "food away from home" segment of the economy, essentially the restaurant business, are not looking good.

The increase for “food away from home” rose 7.1 percent over the last 12 months. The CPI for full-service meals rose 8.8 percent over the last 12 months, and the index for limited service meals rose 7.1 percent over the same period. The effect on menu prices is causing high price exhaustion with diners and restauranteurs both.

Here at MarketMan, decreasing food waste is an efficient and powerful solution to battle current inflation.

Food waste has been a constant for restaurant operators. In the past, large brands in the industry would build or purchase an expensive inventory system to decrease food waste. For smaller operators, inventory management was manual and required an experienced hand who could manage the art of efficient inventory ordering.

Technological advancements like POS platforms have successfully infiltrated front-of-house operations for years now, improving vastly the customer experience. Meanwhile, back-of-office operations have relied on slow but tried and true manual workflows involving the phone, mail, and even the fax to handle order forms and invoices. The back-of-house guru would use gut instinct, experience, and a good checklist or spreadsheet to keep everything running smoothly.

Back-of-house needs similar technology tools that benefits front-of-house to battle inflation.

Imagine implementing a system of inventory control that calculates in real-time, with each customer’s order from the menu, what’s left in inventory and what’s short. With detailed reports, your next order will be precisely what you need from your suppliers. Eliminate over-ordering with easy-to-use software that your entire team can learn quickly.

Eliminate time-consuming manual ordering that often results in over-ordering and lost profits from food waste. With MarketMan.

MarketMan digitally connects your restaurant and your vendors, drastically reducing both food costs and inventory management time. Using an easy-to-learn cloud-based platform, MarketMan customers realize an average of 2-5% reduction in food costs within the first year.

Do the math. Could a 2% to 5% reduction in your yearly food costs help you battle 8.5% inflation and keep menu costs down? And keep customers coming back?

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Additionally, added benefits from implementing the right back-of-house technology, evolving from time-consuming manual vendor management and invoicing tasks, can be impressive.  MarketMan clients report an average boost in order efficiency by up to 50%. This increased efficiency, and time saved, are produced through an integrated ordering cloud platform that allows back-of-office managers to migrate seamlessly between multiple vendors and suppliers with no disruption. Instead of manually taking count on menu items that see an increase in orders or which beverage is most popular, MarketMan provides a digital solution that scratches back hours per day for operators to focus on other important tasks and responsibilities

In one digital location, through a powerful dashboard view, MarketMan eliminates the manual, often uncoordinated processes that can cause errors, consume vast amounts of time, and drain profits and margins.

More importantly, MarketMan customers gain deep insight into how inflation is affecting profits, and how decreasing food costs can counter inflation and higher menu prices.

For a demonstration of how convenient, cost-effective technology from MarketMan can help you battle the effects of inflation, contact MarketMan today.

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