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LAST WORD | FOOD PURCHASING | 53 Read a related story: click here THE ART OF BUYING FOOD
Knowledge is power when it comes to smart purchasing for your school’s foodservice, says Graeme White, purchasing manager at Harrison Catering Services
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urchasing the ingredients for your school’s foodservice can be one of the more complicated areas of procurement. You want the best ingredients to feed your students well, but you also need to think about
what’s seasonal and what can be sourced locally, so that you are investing in your community. And, of course, you want to be sure you’re always get ing the best value for your food spend. Understanding your foodservice is key to making the best
decisions when it comes to purchasing. Your catering team should have detailed recipes for their menus which allow them to work out the number of portions required for each dish and accurately order the ingredients needed. Your storeroom should be adequately, but not over, stocked; an over-stocked storeroom is money tied up in ingredients that are losing their freshness, risking unnecessary wastage. If you’re sure you are purchasing the right ingredients
in the right amounts at the right times, then you can put together a ‘shopping basket’ of your top 20 items, which will usually represent the top 80 per cent of your total food spend, over a period of a week (as a minimum), and then compare the cost of this shopping basket at diff erent suppliers to see which one gives you the best price. Cherry tomatoes might be more expensive at one supplier, but if the overall basket costs less, that’s the supplier you want to use. Once you’ve done this benchmarking exercise, you can repeat it at regular intervals to verify that you are still get ing the best price.
TOP: always aim for the best ingredients, ideally ones that are both seasonal and locally sourced
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