If you pay attention to what the news is telling you, then you’re probably scared out of your wits about the rising food and gas prices! Or maybe you don’t need the news to tell you anything because your customers are dropping like flies and your invoices are climbing faster than a helium balloon escaped from a toddler’s grasp.

But before you make any drastic decisions that could negatively impact your restaurant’s reputation and long-term success, hear me out.

Here are five easy-to-implement systems that will help you weather the storm and also help your business in the long run:

1. Raise prices. If you’re feeling the pinch, you could have no choice. A mistake would be to start ordering lesser quality substitutions to maintain your food cost. People who eat in your restaurant on a regular basis have come to expect a certain level of quality. If you start offering lesser quality ingredients, it will be noticed, and you’ll pay the price in the long run. And you don’t have to raise prices by much to have an impact, as long as you’re implementing changes in other areas, such as what follows here.

2. Purchase smarter. This is a two-parter.

First, ask your distributor for a descending dollar report. It shows what you spent the most money on down to the least amount of money. This isn’t necessarily in volume, but in price per item. It’s not that I ordered 10 cases, it’s that I spent $1,000 — which could have been 1 case. Based on these figures, you can try to find like or better products at cheaper prices, which can have a huge impact on your business. You can take something you usually spend $3,000 a month on and get it down to $2500. Attack the next thing, say it’s $2,000 a month on down to $1500 and so on. Work your way down the report, cutting dollars off each item you order until you get to the bottom and can’t cut any more. You don’t want to sacrifice your quality, so it won’t work on every item, but this can be huge. I’ve had members cut their spending by 5, 7, even 10 percent.

Second, get a prime vendor agreement. Rather than order small amounts of product from a large number of food distributors (otherwise known as “cherry picking”), you’re better off to order most, if not 95 percent, of your product from one distributor. Yes, you might be getting a killer deal on cheese from one vendor, but in the meantime, you’re getting railed in your janitorial and paper items from another. Cherry picking won’t get you far these days. It’s no longer to your advantage to purchase this way. A prime vendor agreement will make a huge impact on your bottom line, cutting percentage points off your operations costs, guaranteed.

3. Recipe costing cards. Create a recipe costing card for every item on your menu. Include everything down to the single piece of lettuce. If you’re a quick service restaurant, you can include the cost of the to-go packaging. Making these cards and training everyone to them eliminates waste and over-portioning. Plus it provides a great training tool.

4. Menu engineering. Sit down and take a long hard look at your menu. Run your key item-by-item sales mix report on your POS System. Plot each item on a graph, with the number sold on the “y” axis and the profits made in dollars on the “x” axis. This will tell you what items are ordered most often and how much in gross profit dollars they make you. The menu items that you sell the least of and make you the least in profits are the dogs on your menu. You don’t want dogs. You want stars. You want popular, high-profit menu items. Get rid of the dogs, highlight the stars. Encourage people to purchase the higher priced items on your menu.

5. Waste sheets. All causes for waste are avoidable and are a direct result of a lack of management and training. Waste includes a burned steak, food that spoiled because it was buried in the back of the walk-in and wasn’t rotated properly, and serving portions that are too large (this ties in to the importance of recipe costing cards).

The waste sheet includes what the item was, that it was wasted, why it was wasted and how much that cost. Some people also like to put how much money it would have been worth if you sold it. Keep track of what gets wasted, and you’ll see a drop in waste. It’s an automatic drop in your food cost. Anything measured improves.

Lean, mean, fighting machine

Whether we’re in a recession or not, these things will impact your bottom line. If you’re already doing these things, I think there are probably places you can still trim. Go back and look at the areas where you can make a difference.

And just imagine. These five suggestions focus purely on cost of goods sold. That’s just one area within your restaurant. There are margins all over your restaurant where you can have an impact.

David Scott Peters is a restaurant expert, coach, trainer and speaker, specializing in teaching independent restaurant owners how to use systems for increased sales and increased profits. He is the nationally acclaimed restaurant coach whose unique “SMART Systems” approach to boosting profits has earned him the title of, “The man who can walk into any restaurant in America and find $10,000 in undiscovered cash before he hits the back door – Guaranteed!” Learn more tips, tricks and secrets in David’s free five-part e-course, “How to Explode Your Restaurant Profits NOW!” Simply sign up to receive the e-course at www.TheRestaurantExpert.com.