Electronic Scales Save Pirogomaniya 45 Million Rubles
Pirogomaniya has introduced an inventory system that tracks every ingredient down to the gram.
As the chain expanded rapidly, it lost control of its food costs. Fresh fillings have a short shelf life, while manual inventory management sometimes left stores short of ingredients during peak hours and at other times filled refrigerators with excess stock, forcing cheese to be discarded just days later. An audit found that hidden losses from spoilage and purchasing were costing the company as much as 4% of revenue.
The company equipped cooks’ stations with electronic scales that automatically deduct the required amounts of dough, cheese and meat from inventory based on each recipe. It then used the data to train an algorithm that factors in seasonality and weather to calculate the day’s prep requirements. For greens and cheeses, Pirogomaniya introduced cross-docking, with suppliers delivering products directly to individual locations instead of routing them through a warehouse.
Managers initially resisted the system, fearing disruptions during peak hours. The company overcame that resistance by adding a raw-material efficiency metric to managers’ KPIs.
As a result, ingredient costs as a share of menu prices fell by 2.8 percentage points, freeing up more than 45 million rubles (about $530,000) in working capital. Inventory counts that once took six hours can now be completed in 45 minutes. The chain’s profitability rose by 3.5 percentage points, while its 28 million-ruble investment (about $330,000) paid for itself in eight months.
