4 Ways IQF Fruits and Vegetables Can Save Your Restaurant Money

If you own a restaurant, you’re already aware of how thin your profit margins are. Most restaurants in America hope to see a 5% margin of profit, while many more operate in the red.

You’re always looking for ways to cut down on food waste and save money.

Have you ever thought of IQF frozen fruits and vegetables? Organic frozen fruit and vegetables purchased from a locally sourced food company can save you money and keep your product quality high. What could be better than that?

Check out four great ways IQF vegetables can help your restaurant’s bottom line.

1. Stabilize Your Inventory

Did you know that food waste accounts for over $2 billion in lost restaurant profits across America each year? That’s a staggering number. If you own a restaurant, you know how much food you throw away every day.

Why do restaurants throw away so much produce? For the same reason people throw it away at home. It goes bad before you have a chance to use it.

Think about it: if you expect a busy weekend, you need to order heavy. The last thing you want is to run out of ingredients for a popular dish. When you order a lot and business doesn’t manifest as you thought, you’ll have to throw it away.

When you throw away food, you throw away your profit. One of the best ways to mitigate your profit loss from food waste is to stabilize your inventory with IQF organic frozen fruit and vegetables.

IQF stands for “individually quick frozen.” This process of flash freezing individual pieces of produce rather than freezing a large quantity at the same time keeps the integrity of the food by producing smaller ice crystals.

With IQF food, you can keep a higher produce inventory without worrying about waste. All you’ll need is in your walk-in freezer, with the IQF food waiting to be pulled out and cooked.

2. Maintain Quality

Every diner has a similar experience. They go out and try a new restaurant and have an amazing, transcendent meal. They rave about the restaurant to their friends and family and can’t wait to return for the next great experience.

Somehow, a few months later, the food is not as good. Once crisp, fresh vegetables are now limp and lifeless. The strawberries and other fruit meant to top their signature dessert they spent months dreaming about are mushy and flavorless.

What happened?

As a restaurant owner, you know that a new restaurant is a business and an aspirational venture. Given that many restaurants close within their first five years, most people open a restaurant for reasons other than money.

They do so because they believe in the food they serve. So when they first open, everything on the menu is fresh and on point. If the opening months go slower than expected, the business side takes over, and corners are cut.

IQF fruits and veggies from a locally sourced food company help you cut those corners without compromising the quality of your menu.

You know that you only have a few opportunities to impress new guests. IQF foods work great because the flash-freezing process maintains all the nutrition and flavor found in fresh produce but saves you money because you can buy in bulk.

3. Inexpensive Out of Season Foods

When you have a popular, money-making dish on your menu, you don’t want to pull it off because some of the ingredients are out of season.

Then again, the cost of out of season produce combined with the reduced quality puts you in a bind. People love that roasted sweet corn and cherry tomato risotto, and you get such a great profit on it to help offset more expensive menu items.

If you employ a talented chef, they can come up with new, seasonal menu items that please the public and make your restaurant money. Let’s be real. Depending on the market, quality restaurant staff is hard to come by.

If you want to keep your standards high and keep your customers happy through staffing transitions, it’s helpful to have a few popular items remain on the menu. Should those menu items require seasonal produce, your best bet are IQF vegetables grown and frozen in season.

4. Lower Seafood Cost

If you live on the coast, fresh seafood is plentiful. Live lobsters, fresh fish, and shrimp are caught daily and are inexpensive to ship.

But what if you want to open a seafood restaurant in Indianapolis? It’s not the best idea, right? If you think about how much it costs to have seafood shipped inland to the Midwest, you’ll reconsider a seafood restaurant.

You’ll avoid putting a seafood dish on the menu. But you don’t have to!

Aside from ready to eat frozen fruits and vegetables, the IQF freezing process works great with seafood.

Shrimp, lobster, crab, scallops, and clams all freeze well and maintain their original consistency. The best part is it’s frozen, so you can buy a ton of it and not worry about the drain of wasting protein.

Even if you live close to the coast, IQF seafood saves you money. While fresh fish is always best, with IQF, you or your guests won’t be able to tell the difference.

IQF Frozen Fruit and Vegetables Are the Future of Restaurants

The problem with frozen fruit and vegetables is that they often lose their flavor and nutritional value. When you decide to switch your inventory to save money, you lose the quality your guests expect.

IQF vegetables from a locally sourced food company save you money on food waste but don’t compromise your menu. These organic frozen fruits and vegetables are the future of your restaurant!

Are you interested in a local IQF produce purveyor to help increase your profits? Contact our SunLeaf team today.