I added a small cafe in Aug last year to my existing brewery's taproom because food was required by the state to reopen. I had no prior experience in running a small cafe (we do mostly paninis and similar). My thoughts roughly a year later is that food is one terrible business. We are close to braking even over that time, minus buildout. We have a wonderful staff and have been blessed with no issues in that department. But other problems are always popping up. Such as pork prices have doubled in the last 3 months. Bread went up about 15% and lots of other things change a lot order to order. We can't change our menu every week, so some weeks a sandwich is perfectly priced, while the next its food cost is 40%. Basically there are just so many moving parts, that change so frequently, so much inventory that expires in just a few days (vegs). So little max potential profit. It's usually a goal of 25-30% food cost, 30% labor cost, 40% to overhead and hopefully of that 10-15% profit (Assuming you didn't piss away 20-30% to a delivery service). I have found that being such a small operation we have yet to really hit the 30/30(60%) its more like a 65-80% in ingredients and labor. Which vary wildly from week to week as customer traffic varies. If sales were to triple overnight we could more easily get it lower and into range of the 30/30 or possibly even 25/25. Just because there would be less wasted food, less wasted staff potential, and more room for improvements. Which brings me to the point of this long paragraph. It seems (from my limited experience) like a restaurant that can't get enough sales for its appropriate overhead size, struggles. I am fortunate enough that we make enough coin to live on the rest of the business and don't need the income from the cafe, but it sure is a lot of work for very little reward that I would never want to mindfully walk into.
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