Restaurant Food Prep Sheet

Do you know how much food should be prepared each day for your restaurant? The restaurant food prep sheet is an excellent tool to know how much you should prepare of each item each day.

Are you losing money in spoiled foods? You need to have a good system in place to help reduce food waste. It is easy and it works.

Inventory – Par – Do

Inv- Every morning the opening manager needs to do a on hand inventory from the prep sheet.
Par – Is the estimated amount of food you think will get you through the entire day and night.
Do –Par minus inventory amounts equals the amount of food you need to prep to get through the day and night.

Do not try to guess or wing it through how much to prep, or you will lose money in spoiled or out-dated foods.

The manager on duty should periodically check the portions and weights on some of the prepped items for accuracy.

Before the prep person is done the manager should check to make sure that the prep is fully done and not over prepped. The manager also should check to make sure that there is no expired date dots and that they are used properly. Rotation, “First In, First Out” (FIFO). The newest prepped item should be placed behind old product- as long as the old product is still within freshness date. Use to identify the items that should be used first.

The prep person should also sweep and mop the walk-in and sweep the freezer. The prep person should also front all product and organize all products, check for expired products, and verify food rotation is correct.

All spoilage and out-dated products need to be entered onto the waste sheet. Then have the manager must sign-off on the spoilage or out-dated products. The manager also should check as to why the spoilage or why the out dated product occurred and verify the food rotation is being done correctly.

Maybe the prep cooks or cooks used new product instead of using the old product first.

One of the biggest reasons why spoilage or out-dated products occur is that the prep person prepared too much food. Sometimes the par needs to be adjusted or sometimes the prep person may want to avoid extra work on the next shift. It could be the prep person thinks that it is saving time to over-prep. The prep cook needs to understand that prepped items have a specific shelf life. The reality is that over-prepping is literally shaving off time from that product’s shelf life, and results in wasted product.

During the inventory process if the manager see’s that we did not sell a lot of a specific product he/or she will adjust the par amount to reduce waste.