T EPISODE 89: WASTE NOT, WANT NOT (ADJUSTING PRODUCTION)
You are the Store Manager reviewing the monthly financial report in the back office. You review the profit and loss statement, and you see your food cost percentage is extremely high. You are losing direct revenue. You pull the daily prep sheets from the past two weeks, and you see that Felip, your morning food service employee, prepares twenty breakfast burritos every single morning. You check the daily spoilage log, and you see that your staff throws away eight of those exact burritos every single afternoon. You are wasting money by overproducing food that customers do not buy. Today, we adjust our production schedules.
Welcome back to Thrive. I’m Mike Hernandez. Today we are talking about the Spoilage Log from the Store Manager's perspective.
In the Thrive phase, you control the P&L by analyzing the operational data. The spoilage log is not just a list of thrown-away items required by the accounting department. It is a direct indicator of your production errors. If you throw away the exact same product at the exact same time every day, you have a scheduling problem. Employees often overproduce because they want the display cases to look completely full, or because they are just blindly following an outdated prep sheet. The Store Manager must review the spoilage log daily and adjust the prep sheets to reflect reality. You must tell your team exactly how much food to prepare based on the sales data, not based on their personal habits.
During my early days on the graveyard shift, I spent a lot of time looking at what ended up in the trash. I realized very quickly that the store's profitability was directly tied to the items we threw away every single night. Learning to control those losses was my first real lesson in business management. You have to take that waste data and turn it into actionable instructions for your staff.
You must have a direct conversation with Felip. If Felip is throwing away eight burritos daily, you must change his physical prep sheet. You instruct him to make twelve burritos instead of twenty. By lowering the production level to match the actual customer demand, you immediately eliminate the financial waste.
Furthermore, you must track the exact times of day the waste occurs. If the logs show you throw away a large quantity of hot dogs at 2 PM, you have identified an operational failure. You must instruct your team to stop placing new hot dogs on the grill at 1 PM. You must differentiate between peak lunch hours and off-peak afternoon hours. You dictate the exact production times and quantities to protect your margins.
Alright, let’s protect the margin. Your job is to analyze the log and adjust the prep sheets.
Here is your Solo Quest for this week. "The Spoilage Analysis." Review your spoilage logs from the past seven days. Identify the top three food items you discard most frequently. Reduce the daily preparation quantity for those three specific items starting tomorrow morning.
I have a "Production Adjustment Worksheet" for you. It is a calculation tool that helps you match your daily prep levels to your actual sales data to eliminate overproduction. Text the code word YIELD to 9 5 6 - 8 9 7 - 9 1 9 2. Get the worksheet. Adjust the production.
And if you want to know how the District Manager spots falsified spoilage numbers, listen to Episode 80 of Drive. I’m Mike Hernandez.
I close every episode the same way — 'Happy Learning.' Those two words aren't filler. They represent everything I believe about development. Learning shouldn't be punishment. It should feel like possibility.