The Hidden Costs
Last Friday, we drove to Pittsburgh (didn’t even know there was a Pittsburgh in the Bay Area!) to pick up jars for our in-house sauces and jangs. Beyond the added cost of jars (which we’ve built into the COGS), the inability to get LARGE volume discounts as a smaller company, and the opportunity cost of having to drive 2.5 hours (as a result of minimums and pallet fees), the time on the road gave us an opportunity to reflect on some of the the hidden costs of operating our business.
Example: customer orders a gil geori toast, mandoo, and kimbap last Sunday for takeaway. The obvious costs are labor and the main ingredients. And then here are the other costs:
order comes in to the back! ticket prints a paper receipt
our cook puts on disposable nitrile gloves and starts to cook under a hood that pulls so much electricity!
Our cook finishes the dishes, puts the kimbap in a maki tray container, mandoo in an aluminum container and wraps the sandwich in a pan liner sheet with kitchen tape. Any excess/scraps gets thrown into a compost liner. He wipes down the station with a towel (rented from a linen company). At end of shift, cook re-packs all cheese, mandoo meat, and ham back into a vac-seal bag.
The FOH staff grabs the packed food from the pass, assembles them in a brown paper bag, asks the customer if they need utensils and proceeds to put a 3 pairs of chopsticks, a couple disposable forks (just in case!), and napkins.
And off the customer goes!
And of course God forbid you can’t run out of any of the items above, so add the costs of holding onto so much inventory! These hidden costs are both a struggle and fun challenge (? hehe) for most folks in the industry, but for us….thinking about this got us going…brb
