Do you think eighty-four pounds of Mediterranean herb mix is a proper garnish for four hundred pounds of chicken?
That question got asked out loud in my kitchen this week, and the answer is obviously no. Nobody wants a plate that's one part chicken to five parts parsley. But it got ordered. Somebody put a par in a system, the system did what systems do, and the result was a line item that makes no sense to anyone who's ever cooked a piece of chicken.
Same week, I saw a prep list calling for sixty quarts of hummus for a single day. Sixty quarts. The order behind it was somewhere north of forty thousand dollars, and that number sat there until one of my managers decided to actually read it.
Here's the thing I've come to believe about the business side of cooking. The systems are not the problem. The ordering platforms, the recipe databases, the scaling tools, they're all fine. They do exactly what they're told. The problem is when we stop reading what they tell us back.
A recipe scaled without a brain is just a receipt.
Somewhere along the way the chef stopped looking at the order with a cook's eyes. Twenty-four ounces became four, or four became twenty-four, nobody checked the unit, and the number went out the door. Multiply that by a few hundred SKUs across a big operation and you're not losing a little money. You're losing the money that was supposed to be your margin, your raise, your next hire.
At this point in my career, my job is less about the plate and more about the money. Coaching the chefs. Building the systems. Protecting the numbers. And the single highest-value thing I can do for the numbers is sit down once a week, open the orders, and ask the dumbest questions in the building.
Why do we need this much of this? What's it for? Who's going to eat it? Does this make sense if you picture it on a plate?
The spreadsheet never asks those questions. Only a cook does. Stay a cook, even when you're the one holding the budget. Especially then.