By Matt Wampler, CEO of ClearCOGS
There is a GM at a full-service BBQ chain who has been running his location for years. He knows how much tri-tip goes into the smoker on a Wednesday night. He knows which sauces run low during a Friday rush and which items slow down when the weather turns. That knowledge lives in his head, built through years of close attention to a single location.
Every morning, he translates that knowledge into a prep sheet. He counts what is on hand, estimates what the day will bring, does the math in his head or on a clipboard, and writes down quantities for every item his kitchen team needs to produce.
It works. Until it does not.
When a new GM steps in, or he is stretched across two shifts, or a holiday falls differently than last year, or a big catering order gets added late, that mental math becomes a liability. Not because the operators are not good. Because no one should have to carry that much in their head.
The Job Within the Job
Every general manager in full-service dining carries two jobs. The first is the one everyone can see: running the floor, leading the team, making sure guests have a good experience. The second is the one that happens before the doors open: forecasting, planning, counting, and translating all of that into a production plan for the kitchen.
The second job is invisible to guests. But it is not small. The Bureau of Labor Statistics notes that food service managers often work more than 40 hours per week, with schedules that stretch from early mornings into nights and weekends. A meaningful portion of those hours is spent on administrative tasks that compound with every location added and every menu item in play.
In a multi-location operation, this problem multiplies. Each store builds its own prep sheet. Each GM develops their own system. One counts in quarts. Another in recipes. A third keeps a handwritten chart of daily pars updated every few weeks. None of these systems are wrong. All of them are fragile.
When leadership looks across the operation and asks why food costs vary between locations, the answer is often not discipline or skill. It is that every location is essentially running a different forecasting methodology, with no shared standard and no data underneath any of it.
What Leadership Actually Wants
What operators want from their GMs is not for them to be better at spreadsheets. It is for them to be present on the floor, building team culture, catching service gaps, staying close to the guest experience.
The paradox is that the back-office work required to prepare for a shift keeps GMs away from the floor during exactly the hours when their presence matters most. Prep decisions have to be made before the rush. That means the GM is buried in numbers at the moment the restaurant needs them most as a leader.
This tension shows up clearly when operators start thinking about what they actually want from technology. Not more dashboards. Not more data exports. What they want is a system that handles the estimation work so the GM can stop estimating and start operating.
The ideal is simple: one number per item, delivered before the shift starts, formatted the way the kitchen already works, accurate enough to trust. The GM reviews it, makes adjustments based on anything the system could not know, and gets back to the floor.
That is the whole value proposition. Not a platform. Not a suite of analytics. A number that is right, in a format that works, before the day begins.
Why “Just Use a Moving Average” Stops Working
Most multi-unit restaurants that have gotten this far are already doing some form of forecasting. They look at the last few weeks of sales, maybe adjust for a holiday, and use that to set the day’s quantities. It is a reasonable approach and it works reasonably well most of the time.
It breaks down in predictable ways.
A four-to-six week moving average cannot account for the fact that this coming Saturday follows a two-week run of rain. It cannot see the large catering order that was placed through a separate platform. It does not know that last Father’s Day, one location ran out of tri-tip at 4pm and had to disappoint fifty tables. It treats every Thursday in October as roughly the same, when they are not.
In a full-service concept, those misses have real consequences. You cannot cook a second brisket in fifteen minutes. If you run out before close, you run out. If you over-prepped on a slow Tuesday, the cost shows up in waste that nobody formally tracks but everyone eventually notices.
The closer the margin between what was prepped and what was needed, the better the shift goes. The further apart those numbers are, the more time leadership spends asking why food costs came in high again.
The Number Is Not the Whole Answer
There is a tempting oversimplification in all of this: that if the model is accurate enough, the human judgment goes away. Operators who have been in this business long enough know that is not how it works, and they are right.
A fifteen-year kitchen veteran knows things the model does not. They know the prep bowl for ranch has a leak and the measurement is off. They know the new line cook portions heavy. They know this specific location always oversells appetizers on game nights even though the model does not see the stadium two miles away.
The most effective use of a forecast is not to replace that judgment. It is to give it a better starting point. The model gets the GM to 80 percent confident before they walk through the door. The last 20 percent is the part that has always required an experienced person. The difference is that now the experienced person is spending five minutes confirming a number instead of thirty minutes building one from scratch.
That shift does not remove the GM from the equation. It changes what the GM is doing with their time.
What Gets Protected When You Get This Right
When GMs stop building prep sheets from scratch every morning, a few things happen.
The first is time. Thirty minutes a day across a ten-unit operation adds up to hours of management capacity every day, most of it spent on a calculation that a well-trained model can do faster and more consistently.
The second is consistency. When every location uses the same data-driven starting point, food costs stabilize across the group. Outliers become visible. A location that consistently needs to adjust the model significantly is telling you something worth knowing about that specific store.
The third is resilience. When a new GM steps in, they do not have to rebuild the institutional knowledge that left with the previous manager. The prep sheet is already there. They are learning to adjust it, not to create it from zero.
None of this replaces what a good GM brings to the floor every day. It removes the back-office tax that was taking them off that floor in the first place.
That is the right use of forecasting technology in a full-service restaurant. Not a tool for analysts. A quiet, reliable input that gives the operator confidence before the shift starts, then gets out of the way.
Sources
- Bureau of Labor Statistics. Food Service Managers: Occupational Outlook Handbook. Updated August 2025. bls.gov
