Ok, recipe costing wizards.... how would you handle this one.

We have a purchased item Luxardo Cherries that contains cherries and juice.

We use the individual cherries in some recipes and the cherry juice in other recipes.

I know the count of the cherries and I know the volume of the juice, so I could easily get portion costs for either one:

1 $31.90 can yields 110 cherries thus each cherry = 29¢

1 $31.90 can yields 52 oz-fl of juice thus each oz of juice = 61¢

If I were only using the cherries or the juice, my recipe costing would be fine, but since I use both, then the per unit of each is artificially increased.

Any ideas?

Thanks,

Eric

Hi Alex - sure!  shoot me an email with your contact info and some times that might work and I'd be happy to help if I can

Eric

eric@whollystromboli.com

Alex - yes. But it gets a little complicated. You would need to know the weight of a full bottle and the weight of an empty bottle (same for kegs as well). With that information you can figure out the actual weight of the alcohol in the bottle. You would then weigh all of your liquor bottles, subtract the weight of the bottle, and enter your count based on weight of the liquor inside. This is highly accurate for determining beer in a keg.

You would have to set up UofM equivalences for your alcohol items explaining the relationship between weight and volume as most if not all of your liquor and keg beer are set up as volume class items. But if you want to go this route, you will get much more accurate costing and usage information than just saying "that looks like .3 of a bottle to me".

Hope this helps,

Geoff Morrison
Synergy Management
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Alex - we do indeed use a weight based system for inventory.   Did you have some ideas around that?

Alex, Geoff is spot on.  We do that very method of inventory here (ie: by weight, subtract tare weight, convert to a decimal value, etc...) and it works well.  Certainly takes out the variability of  "your 4/10ths" vs "my 4/10ths"!

I have been currently using Barcop for my bar inventory and my restaurant has switched to R365. I currently have the weights for all the alcohol I use and is it possible to send the data to R365 and the formulas would be compiled or would I need to enter in the data and create the weight based system to do inventory. I am trying to get this all worked out by the end of the month to start taking my inventory through R365 and roll it out to our other restaurants once I have a complete understanding of the process. 

Thank you for any help or advice,

Alex 

Hi Alex, if you can export (or generate) a csv file from your barcop count data that has the bottle count (not the weight, but the actual count like .65 of a bottle) then yes, with some initial setup, you should be able to import that csv file into your stock count sheet.  I do this every week with Bar-i, which appears to be similar to barcop.  

Eric

I had a similar issue with a client. I believe this is butchering a side of beef and the system isn't really able to handle it. 

For the client it was a simple solution. They were using egg yolks and egg whites separately. Luckily for us those ingredients are used in 1 to 1 quantities. So the solution was just to use .5 of an egg for either yolks or whites.

You could use a percentage of the can based on costs that you determined above to account for the total dollar usage of the recipe. But your calculations were wrong. $31.90 divided by 110 is  29 cents. but you don't account for the juice. The real formula would be 31.90 = 110x(cost of each cherry) + 52y (cost of each ounce of juice) In your example above you would end up with $31.90 of cherries and $31.90 worth of juice for $63.80 a can.

If you want to just place equal value on the two, the juice would be 30.5 cents per ounce and the cherries would be 14.5 cents per ounce. 

Hi Geoff - thanks for the reply and your insight.  I'm glad there is some participation in these forums - I was starting to wonder!

Your explanation makes perfect sense and I agree that if you divide the value between the fruit and the juice based on how one values each of those components, then your formula is spot on.

Have a great Christmas!

Eric