I started in kitchens at fifteen, making pasta in Turnpike Lane and selling it at farmers’ markets on the weekend.
I cooked until 2011. Pasta first, then chef de partie at Market on Parkway in Camden, when it first opened. Stock arrived on Monday against a week nobody had predicted, and by Thursday half of it was wrong.
Then head chef and unit manager at The Fine Food Company, running units at Lord’s and the RHS shows. My job description said to limit wastage and carefully monitor wage costs. It did not say how. So the rota was a guess. I wrote it on a Thursday from memory and the weather forecast, then spent the week fixing it: overtime I had not budgeted for, gaps I covered myself and never logged. At the time I thought I had a staffing problem. I had a forecasting problem.
Then two years as an account manager at Seafood Holdings, with 100+ trading accounts. Michelin-starred restaurants, five-star hotels, hospitals, contract caterers. That is where I started seeing the same forecasting problem everywhere. You can tell which accounts are guessing, because their orders are jagged. Big Tuesday, nothing Wednesday, then a panic order on Friday with a chef tearing their hair out down the phone. From the outside you can see it across a hundred businesses at once. From the inside nobody can see it about themselves.
Then five and a half years at Memotech, selling EPOS, ordering and back-office systems to Irish hospitality. By then the data was already sitting there in every one of those businesses. But most tills had no link to stock ordering at all. The chef controlled one, front of house ran the other, and the two never talked. Sales data on one side, orders on the other, and nobody joining them up.
Kitchen, unit, supplier, software. Four completely different-looking problems. It is one problem.
The bet nobody writes down
Every rota and every stock order is a bet on what you are going to sell. In most multi-site groups that bet is made by a GM, from memory, and it is not written down, not compared against what actually happened, and made differently at every site you own. Twelve sites, twelve forecasting methods, no way to see any of them from group level.
So it surfaces as unplanned overtime, waste, a quiet Tuesday fully staffed and a busy Saturday short. You see it in the monthly numbers, weeks after the money is gone, and you treat it as twelve separate operational failures instead of one systemic one.
The GM absorbs the rest with unpaid hours. That never appears in a report.
None of this was fatal when margins were fatter. Labour was cheaper and easier to find, food inflation was not what it is now, and the gap between the guess and the reality got quietly swallowed. That cushion is gone.
It also gets worse with scale, which is the part operators do not expect. More sites means more independent guesses and less group visibility, not more.
Run it on your own numbers
2% of revenue on a €10m group is €200k a year. That is not a cost-cutting exercise. That is the difference between what you guessed and what was going to happen anyway.
The groups I have seen fix it did not squeeze rotas harder. They made the forecast a number everyone worked from, instead of something living in one person’s head. Sometimes that is software. Sometimes it is a spreadsheet with a rule that everyone actually follows. The tool matters less than the discipline of writing the bet down and checking it against what happened.
If this is your P&L
If you run multiple food and drink sites and this is familiar, we should talk. Astraeus works with multi-site hospitality operators on exactly this kind of operational problem, and the first conversation is a free 45-minute consultation: where you are losing money on labour and stock, roughly what that is costing you a year, and whether fixing it needs software at all.
I have been on every side of this industry. You will get a straight answer.
Read how we work with hospitality groups or book the free consultation.