Hospitality Purchasing and Controls

Course Description

Hospitality Purchasing and Controls explores industry standard cost control and purchasing systems. Students use basic mathematics to perform food costing, yields, recipe calculation, and revenue management, and demonstrate best practices for controlling purchasing and revenue.

Within the SCNS taxonomy, HFT is the Hospitality Management prefix. Daytona State publishes this at 3 credits, offered fall and spring, giving approximately 45 contact hours — the value carried by the published HFT1000 and HFT2500 at the same college.

This is the course that determines whether a hospitality graduate can run a business or only work in one. Restaurants and hotels fail on cost control far more often than on food quality or service, and the margins are thin enough that a few percentage points of food cost or a modest level of theft is the difference between profit and closure. The arithmetic is not difficult; the discipline of doing it consistently is what is rare.

Learning Outcomes

Required Outcomes

• Describe the control cycle from purchasing through service and its control points.
• Describe the structure of a hospitality profit and loss statement.
• Distinguish fixed, variable, and semi-variable costs and describe their behaviour.
• Calculate food cost percentage, beverage cost percentage, and labour cost percentage.
• Calculate contribution margin and perform break-even analysis.
• Develop purchase specifications for food, beverage, and supplies.
• Describe vendor selection, bidding, and supplier relationship management.
• Calculate order quantities using par levels and describe inventory turnover.
• Apply receiving procedures and describe the controls that make them effective.
• Apply storage, issuing, and requisition procedures.
• Conduct physical inventory and value it using recognized methods.
• Calculate cost of goods sold from inventory and purchase data.
• Perform yield tests and calculate as-purchased and edible-portion costs.
• Cost a standardized recipe and calculate portion cost.
• Price menu items using cost-based and value-based approaches.
• Perform menu engineering and classify items by popularity and margin.
• Describe beverage control, pour cost, and the specific risks of bar operations.
• Describe labour cost control, scheduling, and productivity measurement.
• Identify sources of loss, theft, and waste and describe the controls that address each.
• Describe revenue management concepts and their application in lodging and food service.
• Calculate and interpret lodging metrics including occupancy, ADR, and RevPAR.
• Prepare and interpret an operating budget and analyze variances.
• Use technology, including point of sale and inventory systems, for control.

Optional Outcomes

• Describe sustainable and local sourcing and its cost implications.
• Describe contract and group purchasing organizations.
• Describe supply chain disruption and contingency planning.
• Describe capital budgeting for equipment.
• Describe internal audit and loss prevention programmes.
• Describe catering and banquet costing.

Major Topics

Required Topics

• The control cycle
• The hospitality profit and loss statement
• Cost behaviour: fixed, variable, semi-variable
• Food, beverage, and labour cost percentages
• Contribution margin and break-even
• Purchase specifications
• Vendor selection and supplier management
• Par levels, order quantity, and inventory turnover
• Receiving controls
• Storage, issuing, and requisitions
• Physical inventory and valuation
• Cost of goods sold
• Yield tests; as-purchased and edible-portion cost
• Recipe costing and portion cost
• Menu pricing methods
• Menu engineering
• Beverage control and pour cost
• Labour cost, scheduling, and productivity
• Loss, theft, and waste control
• Revenue management
• Occupancy, ADR, and RevPAR
• Budgeting and variance analysis
• Point of sale and inventory technology

Optional Topics

• Sustainable and local sourcing
• Contract and group purchasing
• Supply chain disruption planning
• Capital budgeting
• Internal audit and loss prevention
• Catering and banquet costing

Resources & Tools

• Food and Beverage Cost Control (Dopson & Hayes) — the most widely adopted text, and the one this course most closely follows.
• Purchasing: Selection and Procurement for the Hospitality Industry (Feinstein & Stefanelli) — the purchasing standard.
• Hotel Operations Management (Hayes & Ninemeier) — for the lodging revenue management content.
• Excel or Google Sheets — genuinely the core tool of this course and of the job. Build the spreadsheet skill deliberately; managers who can model a menu in a spreadsheet are visibly more capable than those who cannot.
• Toast, Square, Micros/Oracle Simphony — the point of sale systems you will meet; many offer free demo or training environments.
• MarginEdge, Restaurant365, or Craftable — inventory and cost management platforms; know the category even if you never use a specific one.
• STR — the source of the lodging benchmarks (occupancy, ADR, RevPAR) the industry runs on; many programmes provide student access to STR reports.
• National Restaurant Association and the Florida Restaurant and Lodging Association — industry data, and the FRLA is a useful Florida-specific resource.
• AHLA (American Hotel & Lodging Association) and the AHLEI certifications — the lodging-side credentials.
• USDA and BLS price data — free food price indices, useful for understanding cost trends.
• Florida DBPR and the Department of Revenue — free guidance on licensing and on sales tax and the tourist development tax, which affect hospitality pricing directly.

Career Pathways

• Restaurant manager and general manager — SOC 11-9051 Food Service Managers; the direct destination.
• Kitchen manager and executive chef — chefs who understand cost control get the executive roles.
• Purchasing manager and food and beverage buyer.
• Cost controller and F&B controller — a defined hotel role, and a good route into finance.
• Revenue manager — a well-paid analytical specialization in lodging; SOC 11-9081 Lodging Managers is the adjacent category.
• Hotel food and beverage director.
• Multi-unit and district manager — where the ability to read a P&L across locations is the whole job.
• Catering and banquet management — Florida's convention and wedding markets are large.
• Contract food service management — Aramark, Sodexo, Compass; universities, hospitals, and stadiums, often with better hours and benefits.
• Restaurant ownership — where this content stops being coursework.
• Florida's hospitality sector is one of the largest in the country — the Orlando resort corridor, Miami Beach, the Keys, Tampa Bay, and the cruise ports — and management roles are plentiful for people who can control costs.

Special Information

⚠ The arithmetic is easy; doing it every week is what is hard

• Learn the core formulas until they are automatic — food cost percentage, cost of goods sold from beginning inventory plus purchases minus ending inventory, portion cost, yield percentage, contribution margin, and break-even. They are examinable and they are the language of every management conversation in this industry.
• Percentages and dollars answer different questions. A 25% food cost item with a $3 contribution margin may be worse for the business than a 40% item with a $9 margin. You bank dollars, not percentages, and managers who optimize only the percentage make bad menu decisions.
• Theoretical versus actual cost is the central diagnostic. What the recipes say you should have used, compared to what inventory says you actually used, is where waste, theft, over-portioning, and comping all show up. A persistent gap is a problem with a location, and finding it is the job.
• Inventory must be counted consistently — same people, same order, same units, same day of the period. Inconsistent counting produces noise that swamps the signal.
• Standardized recipes are the foundation of everything. Without them there is no theoretical cost, no consistent product, and no way to attribute a variance. Cooks resist them and managers must insist.
• Yield tests are not optional for expensive items. Purchase price is not portion cost, and the difference on proteins and produce is large. This repository's FSS1222C guide covers the same arithmetic from the kitchen side.
• Update costs when prices move. A menu costed eighteen months ago is a work of fiction, and food price volatility has been substantial.
• Build the spreadsheet yourself. A manager who can construct a recipe costing model, a par level sheet, and a labour schedule in a spreadsheet is more employable than one who can only operate a vendor's software.

⚠ Theft and shrinkage: controls exist because the losses are real

Addressed directly because the textbook treatment is often coy and the operational reality is not.

• Losses come from every stage — short deliveries accepted at receiving, product walking out the back door, over-pouring, unrecorded comps, voided transactions, and cash handling.
• Separation of duties is the principal control. The person who orders should not be the person who receives, who should not be the person who counts inventory. Where one person does all three, losses are undetectable.
• Receiving is the highest-value control point and the most commonly neglected. Weigh and count against the invoice and the specification, check temperatures, and reject what does not conform. An invoice signed without checking is money given away.
• Bars have the highest shrinkage risk in most operations — free pouring, over-pouring, giving away drinks, and unrecorded sales. Pour cost tracked against sales is the diagnostic, and it should be run weekly.
• Point of sale data is a control instrument. Voids, comps, discounts, and no-sale opens by employee and by shift reveal patterns that no amount of observation will.
• Most loss is not dramatic theft. It is over-portioning, poor rotation, spoilage, and mistakes — all of which respond to training and standardization rather than to suspicion.
• Controls protect honest employees too. A documented process means nobody is under a cloud when something goes missing, and that framing makes controls easier to introduce.
• Culture matters more than cameras. Fair pay, decent treatment, and visible management presence reduce loss more than surveillance does — and the operations with the worst shrinkage are usually the worst places to work.

⚠ Revenue management: the other half of the margin

• Cost control is only half the equation. Revenue management asks what to sell, to whom, at what price, and when — and in lodging it is a defined and well-paid profession.
• Learn the lodging metrics precisely. Occupancy is rooms sold over rooms available; ADR is room revenue over rooms sold; RevPAR is room revenue over rooms available, which is occupancy times ADR. RevPAR is the one that matters because it captures both levers at once.
• Perishable inventory is the underlying logic. An unsold room night and an unsold seat at 9 p.m. are gone forever, which is why discounting to fill capacity can be rational and why holding rate can also be rational when demand is strong.
• Menu engineering is revenue management for restaurants. Classify items by popularity and contribution margin, then act — promote the high-margin popular items, reposition or reprice the rest, and remove what neither sells nor pays.
• Menu design influences choice. Placement, boxing, and the absence of a currency symbol measurably affect what guests order, and this is a legitimate tool used responsibly.
• Florida's seasonality is extreme and regional. South Florida peaks in winter; the Panhandle peaks in summer; Orlando follows school calendars and convention bookings. Annual averages conceal everything that matters, and budgets must be built by period.
• Hurricane season is a budgeting reality — cancellations, closures, supply disruption, and insurance costs. Operations that plan for it survive it.
• Tourist development taxes and sales tax affect Florida hospitality pricing and remittance obligations; know they exist and check the current rates locally.

How Florida course levels affect transfer

The first digit of an SCNS number denotes the year of offering, not transferability. Courses at the 1000 and 2000 levels transfer transparently between Florida public institutions, and 3000 to 4000 is unproblematic since both are upper division. The boundary that actually matters is 2000 to 3000, where lower-division credit generally cannot satisfy an upper-division requirement.

HFT2454 is 3 credits and approximately 45 contact hours, offered fall and spring. Expect problem sets, spreadsheet work, and probably a costed menu project — and expect the mathematics to be genuinely central, since the catalog names it explicitly. Students who are shaky on percentages should address that in week one rather than week ten.

As a 2000-level course it transfers on the ordinary lower-division basis between Florida public institutions. Hospitality A.S. degrees are applied and do not carry the A.A.'s junior-status guarantee, though Florida's hospitality baccalaureate programmes are generally well articulated with them — confirm the pathway with your intended receiving institution.