Whether it’s for the good of your household budget or your company’s bottom line, benchmarking your expenses can help determine best practices and identify cost-saving opportunities on food service supplies and more.
For anyone tasked with maintaining a budget within their place of work, benchmarking expenses can help you to strive for continuous improvement as well as maintain and exceed industry standards and practices.
Benchmark Expenses to Save on Food Supplies in the Future
In the foodservice industry, directors and executive chefs rely on this tool to maintain a competitive edge and to tailor their food service supply purchasing to their customers’ evolving needs. This is why it was a main topic of conversation at Pandion’s first Foodservice Committee meeting of the year.
According to Vito Muti, a Senior Business Solution Specialist with US Foods, benchmarking food costs can be especially helpful for providing a comprehensive financial overview of your foodservice operation. It can also help identify opportunities to achieve financial stability without having to sacrifice on service delivery, quality, or customer satisfaction.
How can benchmarks help improve your food service supply operation?
- By helping to better understand current processes
- Identifying opportunities for improvement
- Comparing industry data
- Setting goals
- Creating new management strategies
As Muti notes, benchmarking isn’t only helpful for identifying trends. Programs like Baseline, which is free to all US Foods customers, allows you to measure your numbers against metrics from healthcare foodservice operations from across the country and allows you to get as granular as capturing your daily food costs per patient, per visitor and even per employee.
Remember, you can’t change what you don’t measure. As changes in healthcare continue to change the landscape of how we give and receive care, every dollar helps a facility’s bottom line. Benchmarking food costs is one additional way to strive for continuous improvement and help streamline healthcare purchasing.
To learn more about the latest foodservice contracts, tools, and analytics available to Pandion Optimization Alliance members,
contact Terry Ovenshire, our Director of Food Service & Business Development.