The 30% Food Cost Problem Most Restaurants Accept as "Normal"
Your restaurant loses 15,000 MAD every month to inventory mismanagement. That's not a typo. A typical 50-seat restaurant in Casablanca accepting 30% food costs as "industry standard" is bleeding money through gaps only proper restaurant inventory management software can plug.
The bleeding happens quietly. A case of tomatoes ordered twice because Chef Mohammed and your supplier both thought the other hadn't placed the order. Mint tea leaves spoiling in storage because no one tracked the previous week's oversupply. Your signature tagine recipe using 20% more meat than costed because portions aren't standardized. These aren't dramatic failures — they're Tuesday.
Why Your Current Spreadsheet Method Costs You 12,000 MAD Monthly
That Excel file your manager updates weekly? It's lying to you. By the time numbers hit the spreadsheet, you've already lost money to expired products, over-portioning, and supplier price creep nobody noticed. Restaurant stock management software catches these losses in real-time, not after your monthly P&L reveals another disappointing margin.
Consider what happens during a typical Thursday lunch rush. Your line cook grabs ingredients without weighing. Your supplier delivers 10% less than invoiced, but nobody catches it until inventory day. Your bartender free-pours that 45 MAD cocktail with 60 MAD worth of alcohol. Each incident seems minor. Together, they cost you 400 MAD daily — that's 12,000 MAD monthly vanishing into thin air.
The Three Hidden Costs Beyond Spoilage
Spoilage gets the attention, but three silent killers hurt more. First: recipe drift. Without gram-level tracking, your food costs float up 2-3% monthly as portions grow. Second: supplier accountability. When you can't prove short deliveries or quality issues with data, you eat the loss. Third: menu engineering blindness. You keep serving that vegetable couscous at 35 MAD because you don't know it costs 31 MAD to make after recent price increases.
Restaurant inventory control software transforms these unknowns into actionable data. You see exactly which items hemorrhage margin, which suppliers consistently short-deliver, and which recipes need repricing.
What Restaurant Inventory Management Software Actually Does (Beyond Counting Stock)
Forget basic counting. Modern restaurant software inventory predicts next week's needs based on historical patterns, weather data, and local events. It flags when your olive oil supplier's prices creep up 15% over three months. It tells you that switching from imported to local almonds would save 2,800 MAD monthly without compromising quality.
Recipe Costing That Updates With Market Prices
Your harira soup recipe hasn't been recosted since Ramadan 2023. Since then, tomato prices jumped 20%, lentils increased 15%, and saffron nearly doubled. A proper restaurant inventory program automatically recalculates recipe costs when ingredient prices change, keeping your margins honest.
OCHI's recipe builder tracks ingredients down to the gram, linking directly to current supplier prices. When tomato costs spike, you see the exact impact on every dish using tomatoes — from your 45 MAD harira to your 120 MAD seafood paella. No surprises at month-end.
Which supplier consistently delivers late on Fridays? Who shorts you on weight most often? Whose quality dropped after they switched sources? Without data, you're guessing. With proper tracking, patterns emerge that save thousands monthly.
| Supplier Issue |
Monthly Cost Impact |
Detection Without Software |
Detection With Software |
| 5% short weights |
2,500 MAD |
Rarely caught |
Same-day alerts |
| Price creep (2% monthly) |
3,200 MAD |
Quarterly review |
Real-time tracking |
| Quality variance |
1,800 MAD (waste) |
Chef complaints |
Delivery ratings |
Tuesday morning. You need to order from six suppliers before noon. Most platforms make you pay extra for purchase order features. OCHI includes full purchase order management — create, send, track, and automatically update stock when deliveries arrive. No premium tier. No add-on fees.
The Gram-Level Tracking Requirement Most Software Can't Handle
Here's what Silicon Valley doesn't understand about Moroccan restaurants: you don't buy harissa by the jar. You buy it by weight from Souk El Had. Your olives come in varying sizes. Your meat portions depend on the cut. American-designed restaurant inventory management software assumes standardized units that don't exist in local markets.
Why "Per Unit" Tracking Fails in Moroccan Restaurants
When your software only tracks "units," you lose precision. A "unit" of chicken could be 1.2kg from your Tuesday supplier or 900g from your Thursday backup. That 300g difference? It's 15 MAD per bird, multiplied by 50 orders daily. You just lost 750 MAD because your system can't handle weight variations.
Local market realities demand flexibility. Your supplier sells preserved lemons by the piece Monday, by weight Wednesday, and by the bucket during peak season. Restaurant stock management software built for McDonald's can't handle this. You need tools designed for how Moroccan restaurants actually operate.
The OCHI Difference: Tracking Harissa by the Gram, Not the Jar
OCHI's inventory system handles multiple units per ingredient. Buy saffron by the gram, track usage by the pinch, cost recipes by the serving. Purchase olive oil by the 5L container, portion by the tablespoon, track waste by the milliliter. This granularity catches the small leaks that become floods.
Real example: tracking couscous by weight instead of "bags" revealed a Marrakech restaurant was losing 200g per 5kg bag to moisture and handling. That's 4% waste hidden by imprecise tracking — recovered simply by measuring accurately.
