Part of the Kitchen Manager track. Lesson 7 of 10.
Where in the shift: measured, not estimated.
Prerequisites: Modules 17, 52.
The sequence
Record waste by category for two weeks — trim, spoilage, over-production, plate return.
Designate the recovery streams.
Name an owner for each.
And cost the over-production.
The decisions
What to measure. Four categories rather than one number, per Module 52 — because each has a different cause and a different fix, and a single figure tells nobody anything.
What to recover. Brisket trim, pit drippings, and bread ends are the three worth more than everything else — and all three are by-products of the room's largest operation, generated at the end of a long shift when nobody has attention.
Which means the intervention is a container, a place, and a named person, per Module 17. Five minutes of conversation.
And whether the waste log is measuring anything. A log flat while food cost rises is a log measuring one category — over-production gets absorbed rather than logged.
What you are reading
The four categories, separated.
And the dollar figure on the surplus, because that number is what changes the conversation with whoever sets pars.
What goes wrong here
One waste number.
Drippings down the drain while the kitchen buys a salted base.
And over-production invisible.
Verification
Record four categories for two weeks. The category that is currently invisible will show itself immediately.
The boundary
None specific.