Suppliers
There is a love-hate relationship between suppliers and restaurateurs, with the suppliers being the bane of the restaurateurs with their restrictive minimum orders and supply chain disruptions and with restaurateurs being the nightmare of suppliers with late payments and sudden assortment cuts.
Let's try to understand what are the major risk factors a restaurant faces when dealing with this vital stakeholder:
Continuity: as much as the suppliers themselves try to mitigate shortage, wars and unforeseen calamities can disrupt the inbound flux and cause medium-term sell-outs that can seriously affect a menu that heavily relies on the consistency of the brand. Imagine Mc Donald's finding that there is no more beef available on the market. I'd call that a very big risk. Consider, though, that suppliers are not limited to food; they can be packaging suppliers, cleaning products suppliers or even service suppliers like cloud storage, tiller systems or marketing campaigns. If a supplier cannot provide with continuity what has been agreed upon, the outcome is brutally numeric. It is important to understand that this category of stakeholders needs to be evaluated by this quality before any other and that having a plan 2 or 3 is never going to damage your business. Listing alternatives by knowing exactly why they are not option 1 but are still good to be option 2 or 3 will give you an exact idea of how to face emergencies because you know what you can work with and it will give you tools to limit panic.
Unclear flexibility in terms and conditions: relying on the fact that a supplier wants to keep a healthy relationship with you is a risk that you should not pose on yourself. An upfront investment in a good lawyer (and specifically, a commercial lawyer) will avoid the risk of caveat abuse when suppliers will want to withdraw from their responsibilities or change terms that were previously informally agreed upon. This is especially important when talking about minimum order for purchase of food stock. The same is valid on the flip side, that is being too rigid; if you agree to buy 100kg of flour per day because it's summer and tourists are flooding in, make sure to remember that after summer there is autumn and that 100kg may become a relevant expense on your balance sheet once you start wasting.
No #supplier at all: I'd call this a seed stage risk, that is when an idea is validated on a small scale (see for example the adoption of vegan burgers in a neighbourhood) and a business may want to expand, but the management does not consider the actual availability of #suppliers for a larger scale of distribution. If I make burgers in my cornershop by buying the patties from a little local supplier and then decide to open 10 more shops in different cities, I need to ensure that the exact same product is available in larger quantities and different locations and that there is a logistic system in place to bring the product to me. Standard maintenance of the brand means that the product will have to be exactly the same, affordable and available against discontinuous delivery (see point 1). How many competitors are there in the market, in case of disruption?
What other risks do you think a #restaurant may face when interacting with suppliers? Which differences do you think there could be between restaurants and dark kitchens, considering the latter needs an even more careful analysis of the balance sheet? #darkkitchen