Optimizing your Food Inventory Management with Sustainability Data

As a rule of thumb, it’s hard to control or improve what you don’t track. Which is why efficient food inventory management is the backbone of any successful, sustainable food business. 

Today more than ever, being mindful about costs and optimizing operations over time is key for businesses to stay afloat and keep thriving throughout market fluctuations. In this article, we will give you some expert tips on how to include sustainability in your food inventory management for better, greener results that can enable you to become a true change maker in your industry.

Why food inventory management is the first step towards a sustainable food business

When looking to make a business more sustainable while still being profitable, it all starts from a conscious procurement process and an effective food-inventory management.  

Food inventory tracks orders, storage, stock fluctuations and sales over time, allowing professionals to look back and see which products sell out faster and which don’t, making better decisions and forecasting demand. It’s a delicate balance between having enough to meet the customers’ needs at all times, while still staying financially and environmentally sustainable.

Establishing a proper inventory management system is not simply a necessity, but also a great investment for any business in the hospitality industry. Here’s a few reasons why:

• Lowering costs: inventory allows you to control your cash flow, understanding where the waste is happening and why, making necessary adjustments where needed.
  
  
• Reducing food losses: understanding the best quantity and order frequency for each ingredient helps staff to minimize losses happening before the food even gets to reach the end-consumer.
  
  
• Increasing customer satisfaction: nobody likes being told that their dish of choice is not available anymore. A thorough inventory ensures this won’t happen, and any item on the menu will be available at all times.
  
  
• Improving safety and quality: knowing what you have at hand, keeping an eye on expiration dates and making sure there is enough turnover for ingredients to be fresh at all times is no joke when it comes to passing quality controls and ensuring food safety.
  
  
• Increasing profits: having a clear overview on where your business is losing money can obviously help your business be more profitable. Lowered costs, reduced food loss and satisfied clients all contribute to ultimately increasing your revenues and reputation.
  
  

How can Klimato help for a greener food inventory management? 

We know, it’s a lot. Food inventory management is a cumbersome task requiring lots of time and energy and, especially when trying to keep sustainability into consideration for procurement decisions, it can become a lot to handle. Which is why supplying your business with the right digital tools that can help you monitor, measure and track where your business could do better - both in terms of efficiency and sustainability - can be a lifesaver.

Calculating food’s carbon emissions to optimize your recipes (and profitability)

Food inventory management and menu planning go hand in hand, and Klimato can help you in this process in many ways, allowing you to reduce food impact both on the planet and on your revenue. 

Oftentimes more sustainable, plant-based ingredients also happen to be cheaper. Which is why reviewing your inventory while keeping this into consideration can help reduce your business’ grocery bills by including more low-emissions, high-margin dishes on the menu. 

As a matter of fact, our tool makes it easy and intuitive to play around with recipe swaps, testing out emissions for different ingredients and how they impact the overall footprint of a dish.

Using the reporting function for efficient planning and decision-making

Setting ideal climate goals is one thing, aligning monthly results with them is another. The reporting function on Klimato makes drafting period reports easier, guiding you towards your climate targets, showing where your emissions sit, and which dishes or ingredients have the biggest impact.

Conscious decisions require reliable data. Which is why Klimato developed a comprehensive database empowering professionals to make informed, data-driven choices that really makes a difference. Enriching your inventory information with climate data on CO₂e emissions and environmental impacts can help you see the bigger picture, taking into consideration different factors as well as the environment when working on planning menus and orders.

Integrating climate data into your recipe management and point-of-sale systems

Already using a recipe management or POS system? As complicated as it may sound, we ensure that integrating our tool with pre-existing softwares where your staff is storing and modifying recipes and production data will be a trouble-free, undemanding task thanks to our integrations. 

As a matter of fact, our tool smoothly integrates with recipe management and point-of-sale systems such as Kitchen CUT and Dynamify, allowing you to easily complement your existing recipes with Klimato’s CO data without having to change systems nor enter recipes twice. Once the integration is complete, you will be able to produce climate reports in the Klimato application based on your existing procurement data.

Success stories from our customers

Klimato has been helping hundreds of companies in the hospitality industry to include sustainability in their operations thanks to our software functions, and their feedback provided valuable social proof of how our tool can be successfully implemented by different types of businesses to track and control their emissions:

“Measure what you do so you know where to make an impact. It has been one of our Northern stars and has been very much of help for us to get that extra motivation to go through with the whole work.” 

- Pernille Koppang, Head of Operations and Sustainability at ASIA Aker Brygge

Kitchen staffs around the world also welcomed Klimato’s tool with open arms, brilliantly including it in their planning process in order to make more informed, environmentally-conscious choices when managing their recipes:

"We work with Klimato to aid us in mapping the carbon footprint of all the dishes we produce. We have found this extremely useful in how we plan and put our dishes together. We look forward to seeing where else we can go with Klimato." 

- Rob Smith, Senior Head Chef, University of Bristol

Making a business more sustainable requires new ways of doing things, making bold decisions and implementing solutions that can really bring about change and tangible results in our daily operations. Sometimes that takes a little push, which is why Klimato is here to guide you into your sustainability journey.

Sources 

Becerra et al., 2022
Drewitt, 2013
Food and Agriculture Organization, UN, 2011