How Food Scales Help Small Food Businesses Cut Costs and Reduce Waste

Small food businesses need to run a tight ship to keep control of costs and waste. Weighing scales can help! Let’s get into how weighing scales assist small food businesses in cutting costs and reducing waste. 

Catering Scales: Accurate Portioning for Large Orders & Events

You want your catering event to go off without a hitch, whether you’re serving a buffet at a birthday party or a dozen tables at a wedding. After acquiring a headcount, you’ll need to calculate how much food to make. Everyone needs at least one serving while keeping the number of leftovers minimal, so they don’t go to waste.

One way to make this process easier is to decide exactly how much food each plate gets by weight. For example, 225g of mashed potatoes, 141g of green beans and approximately 170g of steak or chicken. Using a compact or bench catering scale like the NSF-certified Latitude LBX, you could tare off the plate and add the ingredients one by one, taring in between each to get an accurate weight.

By utilising a catering scale to accurately portion each dish, you help guarantee a consistent experience for guests. No one gets too much or too little and everyone leaves full! There’s also less waste because you’ll know exactly how much of each food you should make in bulk to fill each plate. This saves both the company and the customer money.

Coffee Shops: Consistency in Coffee Preparation

Customers can get serious about their coffee – and no wonder, since they might be snoozing at noon without it. So, if your measurements aren’t consistent, with your black coffee strong enough to chew one day and watery the next, the coffee-fiends will notice. Compact scales for baristas, like the CBX, can solve this problem before it starts.

Simply standardise the portions of coffee grounds per the type of drink and ensure you and your team weigh the grounds before the coffee is brewed. Weighing the coffee grounds is much more reliable than using measuring spoons or cups, because the weight doesn’t change depending on how densely packed the grounds are. Your customers will enjoy exactly the taste you want them to, without wasting money on extra grounds!

Delis: Pricing By Weight

Delis will often price certain items by weight, like salami or coleslaw, because customers are typically purchasing part of a batch, rather than the whole thing. You want to ensure that they’re paying the full measure of what they’re taking, so that one person doesn’t pay the same price for a heaping container as someone who requested half the container.

This practice requires a trade-approved scale. That's any scale that the government has approved for use during commercial transactions. Any trade-approved scale is fine to use, but some, like Adam’s Swift Price-Computing Retail Scale, perform extra functions to make pricing by weight as easy as possible. For example, allowing you to store your most sold items along with their price per unit weight. You can recall them quickly when a customer brings the item up to buy. Integrity in this will encourage more repeat customers at your small food business. 

Restaurants: Controlling Portions & Tracking Inventory

Restaurants are essentially catering businesses and delis combined. This means you’ll want to weigh dishes for accurate portioning, but you might also need a trade-approved scale. If you have a 10oz sirloin on your menu, you better provide that weight, especially if you’re not planning to reduce the price if the steak turns out to be less than 10oz pre-cooked.

Scales for restaurants need to be a bit heartier, as they’ll be used non-stop almost every day of the week. You’re weighing meat, fish and ingredients that might get a bit messy. Washdown and waterproof scales like the IP68-rated Aqua ABW-S make excellent scales for restaurants. They can be regularly cleaned without causing any damage. By preventing cross contamination and the spread of bacteria, you’re keeping ingredients fresh longer, preventing waste!

Bakeries: Measuring Ingredients

Baking is a science, requiring precise quantities of specific ingredients so the souffle doesn’t sink and the cupcakes aren’t hard as concrete. When baking in bulk, weighing the ingredients is one of the most reliable ways to ensure that each batch turns out the same way.

Percentage weighing, an application on Gladiator IP68-rated Bench Scales, is one way to portion out batter or dough. Here'st the process:

1. Simply tare out the bowl, mix your batter or add your dough and weigh it whole. This becomes your 100% starting point.
2. Let’s say you want to make 10 muffins. Divide 100 by 10 - Each one should get about 10% of the batter or dough.
3. As you’re removing batter from your bowl, you’ll see the percentage on the display lower accordingly.
4. Continue scooping until the percentage reaches 90%, then move on to the next cupcake tin and repeat. Easy!

Need help deciding which scale is best for your small food business? Contact the Inscale team, we’ll be happy to help!