1)Employee hours for the hotel do not vary greatly from month to month and employee meals are not properly allocated to a separate expense line. 2)Several restaurant ingredients are highly perishable and normally go bad before all the product is used. 3)Many prep items are being over produced during slow times resulting in waste. 4)All the statements above are possible causes for the fixed portion of the food cost. Which would be the best opening paragraph to Scott summarizing your findings? 1) Dear Scott, I received your concerned email regarding our monthly fluctuations in food cost. In short, the large changes in food cost as a percentage of food sales are primarily a result of the varying volume of banquet sales from month to month. Due to their inherent differences as I will discuss in greater detail later, restaurant food sales and banquet food sales have very different cost structures. Food cost for banquet sales is much higher in general than food cost for restaurant sales. Thus in months when banquet food sales far exceeded restaurant food sales, food cost was high. Conversely, in months where banquet sales were low and restaurant sales were relatively constant, food cost was low. 2) Dear Scott, I received your concerned email regarding our monthly fluctuations in food cost. In short, the large changes in food cost as a percentage of food sales are primarily a result of the fixed costs that are inherent to our department. Due to many operational inefficiencies, allocation errors and inventory measurement errors which I will discuss in greater detail later, food cost is fluctuating greatly from month to month. This is further augmented by the fact that our total food sales vary greatly from month to month. 3) Dear Scott, I received your concerned email regarding our monthly fluctuations in food cost. In short, the large changes in food cost as a percentage of food sales are primarily a result of the varying volume of banquet sales from month to month. Due to their inherent differences as I will discuss in greater detail later, restaurant food sales and banquet food sales have very different cost structures. Food cost for banquet sales is much lower in general than food cost for restaurant sales. Thus in months when banquet food sales far exceeded restaurant food sales, food cost was low. Conversely, in months where banquet sales were low and restaurant sales were relatively constant, food cost was high. 4) | Dear Scott, I received your concerned email regarding our monthly fluctuations in food cost. In short, I'm not sure what the exact cause of the fluctuations in food cost is. I imagine that it is in part due to inventory measurement errors and invoice mis-codings. It is difficult to ascertain the exact cause, but I am determined to more tightly manage my department and ensure that we have more consistency in the future. Below are some of the steps we are planning on taking to ensure this consistency: | |