I know our reputation has gone downhill and whatnot but i heard that some stores are cutting their hot bar/salad bar/etc in half? Is this just the first step to get rid of the entire department?
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How the heck can prep foods have really high shrink when they take hundreds of dollars of product from produce, grocery and specialty and HARDLY EVER transfer them. This has been going on for years and no one will make them do all their transfers!!!! My STL knows it but pretends they are not doing it, then when our inventory was off he actually questioned us and said prep foods did great, why didn't you????? I could have sp-t on him.
I have been the buyer for prepfoods for 3 yrs now, with the company for 8. I first started 2 wks before covid shut down the stores. I noticed then we was wasting alot of food. We are making our pre-covid sales now, but I know other stores are not so lucky. They have cut so much on protein (which is good) and taking soo many recipes out our catalogs. Making everything as simple and easy to make that you only need a small team to get by. My team is maybe 15 total and we are doing $68k a week. My old and new coordinator is bouncing off our ideas to get other stores on board. I knew covid would be a good excuse to start cutting down on prepfoods. Way too much money is being spent on things just to throw out , but they wanted high shrink numbers (stupidest thing I ever heard). They are constantly cutting down staff in corporate. I know we are next
https://www.wsj.com/articles/whole-foods-market-explores-building-off-site-kitchens-to-supply-food-bars-4ca144d4
Prep foods and bakery never really made much money. The teams took a lot of labor to run them right and they generated a TON of shrink. When Amazon came in and started cheapening things like scratch made berry chantilly cakes etc. and moving towards commissary cooking, sales really started to suffer. I left five years ago and the writing was on the wall then. Yes prep foods will pretty much look like a Kroger or Albertson’s soon. Go count how many grocery TM’s you have plus whole body TM’s. That total is probaly less than the prep foods team. About 40% of the sales and about 60% of the net for the entire store come from those two teams. Specialty is up next. Guess where prep foods and bakery rank? The Amazon model doesn’t value what the perimeter departments used to provide.
Prep is a dumpster fire at my location from what I have read its the same at other locations. This company su-ks and has been on the downhill for the past several years. Fu-k the e-team and the regional presidents for allowing the debauchery the past few years have been.