The Most Expensive Item in Your Kitchen is the Garbage Can

I’ve sat down with dozens of restaurant owners who all tell me the same story.

They look exhausted. They tell me, "Dave, the dining room is full. The kitchen is slammed. We are doing record sales numbers. But when I look at the bank account at the end of the month, there’s nothing there."

They usually think the problem is theft, or taxes, or that they need to raise prices. But nine times out of ten, I walk into their kitchen, walk straight to the prep station, and point at the trash can.

"There is your profit," I tell them. "You’re throwing it away."

In this industry, we survive on pennies. A restaurant profit margin is razor-thin—usually between 5% and 10% if you're good. That means for every dollar of food you waste, you have to sell ten dollars worth of food just to break even on that mistake.

Here is how to stop the bleeding.

The Myth of Yield

The biggest mistake non-chef owners make is looking at the invoice price, not the usable price.

Let’s say you buy a whole beef tenderloin for $15 a pound. That sounds like a great deal. But you can’t serve the fat, the silver skin, or the chain. By the time your prep cook cleans it up, you might have lost 30% of that weight.

If your cook is rushed, untrained, or just careless, maybe they cut off too much meat with the fat. Now you’ve lost 40%. Suddenly, that meat doesn't cost you $15 a pound; it costs you $25 a pound. If your menu price is based on the $15 cost, you are losing money on every single steak you sell.

The Fix: We do "Yield Tests." We weigh the product when it comes in, and we weigh the usable meat after it’s cut. We train the staff on proper butchery so they treat that product like gold—because it is.

Portion Control is Not Being Cheap

I often hear owners say, "I don't want my chefs using scales or measuring cups. It looks cheap. It looks like a cafeteria."

That is ego talking, and it’s an expensive conversation.

Consistency is the hallmark of a professional kitchen. If a customer orders the pasta today, and it’s huge, but they come back next week and it’s smaller (because a different cook was working), they feel cheated.

But let’s look at the math. If your line cook "eyeballs" the shredded cheese and adds just one extra ounce to every burger, and you sell 100 burgers a day, you are giving away over 2,000 pounds of cheese a year. That is thousands of dollars vanishing into thin air.

The Fix: Ladles, scoops, and scales. Every station needs them. It’s not about being stingy; it’s about ensuring that the customer gets exactly what they paid for, and you keep the margin you calculated.

The Clear Bin Test

If you want a wake-up call, try this tomorrow.

Go to your local supply store and buy clear heavy-duty trash bags. Replace all the black bags in the kitchen with clear ones.

For one week, do not let the staff take the trash to the dumpster until a manager (or you) has looked at it. You will be shocked at what you find. You will see half-chopped onions, silverware that got scraped off the plate, and perfectly good trim that could have been used for soup stock.

When staff knows the boss can see what they are throwing away, their habits change overnight.

Trust, But Verify

Finally, look at your back door. Are you weighing your deliveries?

Drivers are human. Sometimes they drop a case. Sometimes the invoice says 50lbs of potatoes, but the box only weighs 45lbs. If you just sign the clipboard without checking, you are paying for air.

In the old school, we had a saying: "You make your money in the dining room, but you save it in the kitchen."

Stop feeding the garbage can. If you feel like your food costs are spiraling, it might be time for an audit. At Dave’s Cuisines, we help you tighten the screws on your operation so the money stays where it belongs: in your pocket.

Next up in the Restaurant Rescue series: Why you need to stop trying to be a Hero and start building a System.