LESSON 15: ACHIEVING YOUR MARGIN

Making sure your cheese sales deliver to your company’s bottom line isn’t always a straightforward process. There are many things to consider when understanding how cheese departments become profitable.

Managing Shrink 

• Consider selling only retail pack formats on your most highly perishable items (i.e. Ricotta).
• Net weight – The net weight you pay will often be higher than the net weight you receive and the net weight you ultimately sell due to natural evaporation in storage. You may want to factor this loss into your pricing.
• Track the amounts used for sampling, consider applying some sampling shrink into cheese costing and pricing.
• Cut less more often.
• Be sure to use any cuts that haven’t sold but have been wrapped for too long as samples.
• Buy highly perishable cheeses only as needed.
• If you consider a case of six small cheeses, and you use one for sampling to sell the rest, the ones you sold now cost you 20 percent more, consider factoring that cost into the pricing of that cheese.
• Remember the rind is part of the cheese, you pay the same by weight for the rind as the cheese and so should the customer. Selling rindless pieces of cheese or selling rinds separately can create a margin-depleting precedent.
  
  

Taking Advantage of Discounts

• Be aware when your supplier is offering allowances or products and make a point to buy extra product during that time if it’s stable and sturdy (i.e. hard cheese).
• Decide whether it’s better at the time to pass along the savings to your customers or enrich your margin to offset other losses.
• If your supplier isn’t offering you allowances regularly, work with them to arrange some. Discounts can build volume and sales for everyone.