That extra ounce is costing you $30,000 a year.
In this concise monologue, Donald Burns illustrates how a seemingly minor portion overage can dramatically inflate restaurant costs. Using a concrete example—an $8 per pound ingredient where an extra ounce adds $0.50 per plate—he shows that serving that extra ounce on 200 plates daily adds $100 per day, which compounds to $30,000 annually when repeated over 300 days. Burns emphasizes that while suppliers are often blamed, the kitchen is responsible for the deviation. He then outlines practical corrective actions: place a scale at the prep station, verify the recipe, monitor actual portions during service, and correct any drift before it becomes the new norm. The overarching message is that “close enough” becomes extremely expensive when multiplied thousands of times.
