Food Waste Programme: Improving Operational Efficiency and Productivity for Restaurants
The F&B industry in Singapore has been expanding at a rapid scale. The total number of establishments has increased steadily year by year. Even with the industry being badly affected by the economic downturn and lockdown measures in 2020, 1,132 firms joined the sector, according to Handshakes and the Accounting and Corporate Regulatory Authority (Acra), showing an overall net increase of 96 by June last year.
Number of restaurants in Singapore from 2005 to 2018
The major challenges gripping the foodservice industry in Singapore are strong competition and high operating costs. Alongside the demand for new dining concepts, trends and fads, many more foodservice businesses are entering the market especially with the low barriers to entry. According to a report titled ‘Turning Passion into Profits’ published by Enterprise Singapore, 28% of food establishments are replaced yearly.
A benchmarking report published by the Singapore Productivity Centre (SGPC) in 2017 showed the breakdown of average costs as a percentage of total sales. Unsurprisingly indicating the high operational costs involved across all the different types of food establishments. One of the biggest issues restaurateurs in Singapore face is the lack of homegrown food produce supplies. Almost 90% of all the food products in Singapore are imported, which essentially reflects higher costs of ingredients and even lower profit margins.
2017 Productivity Benchmarking Food Service Sector
The cost of ingredients and labour takes up almost two thirds of the total sales and these costs are only expected to continue rising in the near future. This coupled along with the fierce competition in the industry only serves to warn restaurants that if they don’t want to be a part of the losing 28% that gets replaced yearly, they need to effectively streamline their operations and improve overall efficiency.
Food Waste Management Programme
FoodRazor will be embarking on a partnership with SGPC through the Food Waste Management Programme, which aims to assist F&B companies to streamline their menu, reduce food costs, develop standard operating procedures for recipe management, and establish food waste cards.
During the initial analysis phase, FoodRazor will utilise its key invoice digitisation feature by line-item to automate the process and analyze the last few months’ worth of invoices to get a stronger sense of the establishment’s current food cost structure. Following the consultation process with SGPC with the data collected, a new SOP will be established for the organisation and FoodRazor will be used as a monitoring and insight tool to track its effectiveness.
What is the Singapore Productivity Centre?
The Singapore Productivity Centre (SGPC) is a one-stop competency centre endorsed by the National Productivity Council. They aim to drive enterprise productivity for sustained growth and competitiveness, focusing on the retail, food services and hotel sectors. SGPC provides a comprehensive range of services and solutions to help enterprises, including in-depth productivity consultancy, conferences and workshops on productivity-related topics, benchmarking and applied research.
What has SGPC done?
SGPC has been helping various foodservice and hospitality partners in their journey towards adopting greater automation technology in their daily operations, be it in the kitchen or front-of-house. Effectively addressing the problem of inconsistent and inefficient systems which are unable to cope with production needs and quality, by keeping costs down and food quality up. The organisation highlights key problems and provides in-depth strategic reviews, including leading establishments with practical recommendations and full guidance in operational process redesign, restaurant model transformation, food menu conceptualisation, innovative dining concepts, etc. – all against the feasibility and market industry.
If you’re interested to learn more about the Food Waste Programme, set up a consultation with us through this link.
