Your customers come in all different shapes and sizes, but on most hospitality businesses, portions are the exact same for everyone. One of the many reasons food comes back from our restaurants is because the portion was too large. Some businesses fall under the trap to try and give too much, so that customers do not complain the portions are too small. So how do we get pass this?

Again, you are running this business so the decision is up to you, but some of the things you can do is:

1. Have menus that include items in starter size or main course size

2. Make the portion size a customer choice rather than a chef’s choice.

3. Price both accordingly.

4. Add notes to your menus and train your severs to let customers know if they want second servings of a given dish all they have to do is ask for it (you will find 99% of customers will not).

5. Perhaps the serving plates are very large and the food portion therefore looks much smaller once it is in the plate?

6.  Your serving tools might be  too large.

The options to tackle portion control very much depend on the type of food service you offer. I give you an example from beautiful Ireland again.

Case Study

We were tackling food waste at a hotel that had a huge amount of business from a Carvery lunch. Close to 1000 people walked in through this carvery every day during high season. Our carvery chefs were behind the counter dishing up food as fast as they could! After watching just one service, we clearly realised that the plates of food customer were getting were in most cases, nearly twice the size as they would need to be. This is not our chef’s fault, they were simply serving the amount of food they deemed necessary, the amount of food they would like to see in a plate themselves. But our customers varied in size, nationality and hunger needs on the day! The first thing we did is train the chefs, explain why portion control was important to us. We also changed the size of the plates they were serving food on, from large ones to medium ones, and asked them to ensure the food served covered the plate but did not over spill, on to the sides or on top of each other. We also changed their serving tools, from big ladles to smaller ones, and trained them to serve only one ladle of food per item, checking always with the customer if they wished to have more. Service did slow down slightly, as now chefs interacted with the customers more, asking them if the portion served was enough, but food waste was reduced greatly, plus this new interaction between chef’s and customers made service a much personalised experience for our customers.

For those that do not operate from a carvery service, menu planning is a huge part of portion control. Sit down with your chef and go through every single item in the menu, decide on the amount of grams of each type of food  that should be served in a dish. Pay particular attention to those items that are high value like meat and fish and really determine the size those items should always be. Write down each dish as a clear recipe, with grams included for each item of food. You can also includes pictures of what the finish dish should look like, so that consistency is a factor in your food service. Once you have all dishes written down and images taken, call a chef’s meeting, and organise a training day. There is a chart on this week’s workbook where you can write down a revision of your portion control, look at the food that comes back from your different service areas and really look at the size of the dishes and the portions of food that are served.