Food write-offs in a café: how to track them and what they tell you about your business

Food spoils, gets dropped, runs past its use-by date — that's normal for any venue. What isn't normal is when it happens unnoticed. A write-off is how you make losses visible: you record what left your stock without being sold, how much, and why.

Why it matters

If you don't write off what you throw away, your records keep assuming the product is still in stock. At the stock count, it turns into a shortage, and there's no way to tell what it was: spoilage, a mistake or theft. A write-off recorded with a reason answers that question straight away.

What to record

• what was written off and how much;
• the reason;
• who wrote it off and when.

Typical reasons:

• expired — the product is past its use-by date;
• spoiled — the product went bad early because of how it was stored;
• damaged — dropped, broken, crushed;
• test use — developing new dishes, dialing in the grinder;
• accounting error — correcting data that was entered incorrectly.

Staff meals are best tracked separately from spoilage — otherwise they get mixed in with losses and distort the picture.

The golden rule: write off right away

Write-offs done “at the end of the week, from memory” are almost always incomplete. Agree that spoiled product is written off the moment it's thrown away. It takes less than a minute if your system is at hand — on a phone or tablet.

How to analyze write-offs

Once a week, look at the write-offs for the period and answer a few questions:

• Which items are written off for the biggest amounts? It's usually a handful of products, and those are the ones to tackle first.
• Which reasons dominate? Lots of expired stock — the problem is purchasing. Lots of spoilage — storage. Lots of damage — kitchen processes.
• Are there patterns? For example, if milk always gets written off after the weekend, it's being ordered on Friday with extra “just in case” that doesn't always sell.

How to reduce write-offs

• Buy more often and in smaller batches for anything that spoils quickly.
• Follow “first in, first out”. Put new deliveries behind the old stock, not in front of it.
• Label the opening date on open packages and prepped items.
• Prep for actual sales, not “just in case”.
• Drop menu items that barely sell but need their own perishable ingredients.
• Watch use-by dates ahead of time, not on the day they expire — while the product can still be put to use.

Write-offs in Crumble

In Crumble, every write-off has a reason — expired, spoiled, damaged, test use or accounting error — and the quantity, employee and time are saved with it. Operations can't be deleted, so the history stays honest. And notifications warn you in advance when a product is nearing its use-by date or its stock drops below the minimum.