Part of the Kitchen Manager track. Lesson 5 of 10.
Where in the shift: before any item goes on.
Prerequisites: Modules 43, 45, 47, 48.
The sequence
Map every ingredient to every item that uses it.
Count items per station.
Count SKUs against shelf capacity.
Rank by velocity.
And design for what holds.
The decisions
Whether a new item earns its place. The ingredient map answers it.
An ingredient in one low-velocity dish sits until it dies, per Module 48 — which makes a single-use ingredient a permanent recurring waste line attached to one dish, invisible until somebody attributes waste to dishes rather than to categories.
And the fix order matters: cross-utilize first, substitute second, remove last — because removal is the crudest available intervention and it is usually reached for first.
Whether the menu can be executed. Count items per station — if one holds more than about a third, that station is the constraint by design, per Module 43, and no staffing decision fixes a menu decision.
And whether the menu works on both nights. A core that one cook can execute on a Tuesday, with additions that appear when the staffing supports them.
What you are reading
Waste concentrated in a few ingredients — the signature of single-use items.
One station always behind.
And complaints confined to the low-velocity dishes, because those are made by someone who has not made one in three weeks.
What goes wrong here
An item added without an ingredient map.
A menu loading one station.
And a made-to-order dish on a menu that gets executed in twelve-minute surges.
Verification
Build the ingredient map. A list with one entry is a finding, and the exercise takes an afternoon.
The boundary
Menu labeling, allergen disclosure, and nutritional claims carry legal requirements governed by applicable law and the local health authority.