Restaurants anxious as omicron and high food costs take toll

How restaurants in the U.S. and United Kingdom are open without restrictions and often bustling, they are entering their second winter of the coronavirus pandemic anxious about what is ahead: They are squeezed by labor shortages and skyrocketing food costs and the omicron variant is looming.

A detailed article posted by: DEE-ANN DURBIN, MAE ANDERSON and SYLVIA HUI, AP News
Titled: Restaurants anxious as omicron, high food costs take toll
URL: https://apnews.com/article/restaurants-squeezed-omicron-labor-shortages-food-costs-acf43f8e1bc9cdccc6e85dd699d99edc
Date Posted: December 19, 2021

The key take-aways from the article are as follows:

• Many diners are nervous about omicron variant and are not eating out, bookings are low or are canceling.
• Staffing remains a challenge. In a recent survey of 3,000 U.S. restaurant operators, 77% said they do not have enough workers to meet demand, according to the National Restaurant Association, an industry trade group.
• Restaurants have been raising prices as their own food and labor costs rise.
• Margins are thin and thus prices will have to be raised to keep up.
• Restauranteurs are looking for government support.

This article correlates with our previous article: Food is more expensive than it has been in decades

Restaurant owners and food service industries can track their costs better by utilizing Costmenu's services with some of the following solutions:

Ingredient Cost Tracking.

Costmenu allows users to track food and ingredient costs for their prepared and menu items. This is critical to make sure menu items are priced correctly in order to maintain proper returns.

Adjustments to compensate for additional costs.

Costmenu provides two additional fields for waste and add-on percentages. These percentages can be used for adjustments in order to compensate for the other ancillary costs percentages such as labor, utility costs increase, and other factors associated with the food preparation and business items.

Track returns, profits, and margins on menu items.

Costmenu provides detailed and real time costs vs price analysis showing returns, cost multiples and actual profit margin on menu items. These stats are easily reviewed using graphs which provide as a convenient data visualization showing the returns on each menu item.

Comparing different ingredients against each other.

Users on Costmenu can compare different ingredient item costs and usage against each other and how they influence the overall costs. This can be useful when needing to replace a more expensive product with another food item.

About Costmenu:
Costmenu is a food/menu/recipe costing software that offer many advantages over excel spreadsheets and other inventory management programs. Costmenu integrates a powerful dashboard, food, prepared, and menu item costing features, menu building features, custom qr code label makers, document storage, event/catering management features, data security, performance measurement, data analysis and comparisons, CRM, and generation of various reports. For more information on Costmenu, visit https://costmenu.com, email sales@costmenu.com, or phone (949) 274-4814.