I watch random food shows like “Food Paradise” on Travel channel, and “Triple D” by the Mayor of FlavorTown himself. When they speak to the owner/cook, they say things like “oh we cook 400 lbs of BBQ a day” or “about 3000 pancakes each day” or whatever. How do they know that’s what they will use? Seems like a guessing game.
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It’s definitely a guessing game, but it also comes from experience. Something that needs lots of prep time like BBQ, they’ll prep a certain amount for each day, saying “Well, last week we sold about 400 pounds on weekdays and 600 pounds on weekends, so let’s do that again. Oh, but it’s a holiday this weekend, so we might have some more customers than usual, let’s do 700.” Ideally, they’ll sell that amount or very close to it each day and have minimal waste (and depending on the product, leftovers can still be sold, or used in other dishes). Sometimes they guess low and have to tell customers “Sorry, we’ve run out of X today.” The more experience a restaurant gets, the better their guesses will end up being, and the less chance of guessing low (bad for the customers, which is also bad for the restaurant) or having excessive waste (bad for the restaurant).
Something like pancakes are easier, because they’ll make a big batch of pancake batter in the morning. And even if they happen to run out… it’s pancake batter, and you can whip up a fresh batch in a couple of minutes. And the nice thing about batter is that most of the ingredients can be ordered in bulk and left on the shelf for weeks or months if needed (flour, sugar, baking powder, oil, salt), and the remaining ingredients (milk and eggs) can be ordered as needed, and will be used for other items on the menu as well. It’ll be hard to run out of them, and they can be used over a couple of days until they run out and the next order starts to be used.
Pancakes are made to order. When a restaurant knows they sell a lot of pancakes, they have huge batches of batter ready to go.
BBQ- they might cook 400 lbs of brisket a day but guess what, the brisket still gets sold the following day if there is extra from the day before.
With experience you get to know how much to make. They don’t always get it right, running out of something or having wastage at the end of the night is part of a normal restaurant operations.
The well run locations will have less wastage.
It is a guessing game. You get used to how busy it’ll be on certain days. Then if you run out of stuff you still have extra raw ingredients, so you hustle hard balancing cooking meals, and prepping everything else
They can project based on a variety of factors, like day of the week, weather, etc. by tracking past sales and noting trends. Many components can be held for a couple days, so they have some surplus if they get a run on an item while other things can be made on the fly. Other items, they may just run out… like BBQ that needs to be smoked for many hours.
Your bigger chain restaurants use computer calculations that tell you what to “call” each day. The opening manager goes through each chiller drawer on the line and the racks in the walk in, counting what is left from previous days (hopefully also pulling anything past date) the difference between what is needed and what is available gets called. The morning in a restaurant is very busy and is the most expensive part of the day. You have a full staff of cooks on hand doing prep work for a couple of hours before you open and are finally able to sell food to pay for the labor.
Basically how much food you made exactly a year ago. If the food output has grown ten percent, then you scale ten percent.
American restaurants used to have huge volumes of waste. Still do. Employees take it home. Some get donated to homeless shelters.
In the context of the show you are watching, the owner/cook is actually saying the average amount of food they cook a day “in the past”. Historical data is the easiest (but not most reliable) way to estimate the future.
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