Mirus Reporter

The wave of the future?

Within every industry, technology enables us to make positive changes to increase growth and productivity - Upping the ROI is certainly a great reason for making those changes. The restaurant industry is no exception.

Introduction

Controlling food costs is essential if you are interested in restaurant profit margin. I'd like to discuss a few options for implementing controls over your food costs. In practice, there are many ways you can create a control. Let's start with a definition:

According to a website affiliated with the NRA, "The seven stages (of food cost control) are purchasing, receiving, storage, issuing, preparation, cooking, and service."

If you include retailing and selling under service, I agree. If your controls over food costs do not cover the activities of selling, or retailing, you are not seeing the entire picture.

Be careful when researching food cost controls. There are too many sites that think food cost control is simply the formula for calculating Actual Food Cost as a percentage of sales. While this formula is useful as part of a control, by itself it is simply a measurement.

UPDATE 02/4/16:

To do better, we must be better

Improvements to Mirus dashboards are coming and full of enhancements while keeping all the existing functionality! Currently, we're in a beta testing mode as we seek input from #MirusNerds but users should be able to experience the new dashboards by March.

Restaurant Industry Scorecards

As a multi-unit restaurant operator, it's your job to know which locations are doing well and which locations need help. Scorecards can help gauge the health of a specific restaurants quickly and accurately. To start, you need to collect data from each restaurant location such as:

Our clients love us and we love them right back! We're constantly amazed by their ingenuity and accomplishments. Their ideas and requests are what keep us on the leading edge of restaurant business solutions. Each month we shine the light on our clients, their accomplishments and what they're doing to increase their restaurant profit margin.

Good things come in small packages. Well at least that was the hope when Dairy Queen launched their Mini Blizzard five years ago. Some worried that offering a smaller version of the brand's top menu item would cannibalize sales of their top seller and higher margin item, the 16 oz. Blizzard. For most companies that's where new products die. Someone voices a opinion based on past experience and their thoughts and feelings and the new product never makes it out of the marketing office. "That is not a good basis for making marketing and operating decisions," says Mirus CEO Dave Bennett. "You need data and facts to back up your decisions."

Managing a number of multi-unit restaurants can be challenging but put those restaurants inside an airport and you’re facing some very unique obstacles. Here are 5 tips on how to improve restaurant operations in airport locations. I will use OTG in some of my examples. OTG is a client of ours who specializes in airports locations. Make sure to check out the links in the article, we have some video interviews from our friends at OTG!

You can not properly manage multi-unit restaurants if you are not measuring the performance of individual units. Mirus has long provided a reporting feature that allows decision makers to filter data in a best and worst format. This allows you to see your segmented data in a “top” and/or “bottom” ranking.

For instance, you could display the top and bottom 5 employees based on sales within each store or top and bottom 10 food items in each category. This type of insight is extremely valuable if you want to recognize those who work hard and discuss improvement with those who are struggling.

Taco Mac restaurants are casual, neighborhood restaurants serving delicious, genuine food, a huge selection of craft beer on draft, and the best sports watching environment anywhere. With 30 restaurants in three states, T.MAC was founded as Taco Mac in the Virginia-Highlands neighborhood in Atlanta in 1979. Today, T.MAC has become one the Southeast’s most beloved places for friends and family to come together and hang out. In every location they operate, T.MAC is dedicated to serving the communities that surround their restaurants.

I got to sit down with Lauren at our most recent user conference and learn about how her team is continuing to expand their use of Mirus.

The first Dewey’s Pizza opened in 1998 in Oakley, in the City of Cincinnati, Ohio. With a reputation built on excellent service, hand-tossed artisan pizzas and gourmet salads, there are now more than 20 Dewey’s Pizza restaurants in the Cincinnati, Dayton, Cleveland, Columbus and St. Louis markets.

I had a chance to catch up with Jason at a recent conference and learn more about his experience with Mirus.