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Topic starter
28/11/2025 11:48 am
From an industry perspective restaurant profit is made or lost in the margins. The biggest challenge for any operator is controlling food cost. Food cost is a percentage. It is the ratio of what an item costs you to what you sell it for. The problem with an in-house dough program is that your food cost is variable. It is a moving target. The price of flour fluctuates. Your labor cost changes. Your waste percentage is different every week. This makes it impossible to accurately manage your budget. As specialists like LGM USA know the key to profit is a fixed unit cost.
Let's look at the chaos of an in-house dough program. To calculate your "cost per bun" you must be a data expert. You have to track the 50-pound bag of flour. You have to track the salt the yeast the oil. Then you have to calculate the labor. How many minutes did your prep cook spend? Then you must calculate the waste. You made 100 buns but you only sold 90. This means the true cost of those 90 buns just went up by 10 percent. Your food cost percentage is a nightmare of variables. You are just guessing.
This inventory problem is just as bad. You are not stocking one item "pizza base." You are stocking five. You have flour in the dry storage. You have yeast in the fridge. You have salt and sugar. This is more money tied up in inventory. It is more things to count every week. It is more chances for things to go wrong. It is an inefficient system. It clogs up your storage and your budget.
Now let's compare this to a "buy" strategy. You partner with a specialist supplier. You have one item on your inventory list: Wholesale Pizza Buns. You have one simple invoice. It tells you the price per unit. Let's say it is one euro. You now have a fixed known and predictable cost. Your food cost calculation becomes incredibly simple. You know that every pizza you sell has exactly one euro of base cost. There is no guesswork. There is no variable labor. There is no waste.
This is the key to financial control. You can now build your menu prices with confidence. You know exactly what your profit margin is on every pizza. You can track your inventory with ease. You count the buns. It is a simple "just in time" system. You order what you need for the next two days. You are not tying up your cash in bags of flour. You are not managing five inventory items. You are managing one. This is a lean and efficient model.
In summary from an operator's standpoint an in-house program is a financial mess. It creates variable costs and complex inventory. Sourcing your buns is a clean solution. It gives you a fixed unit cost. It simplifies your inventory. It is the foundation of a financially healthy and manageable kitchen.
To learn more about simplifying your food cost management we recommend you learn more from NOVAKS BAKERY.