How to Set Kitchen Par Levels (With Worked Numbers)

Ask five kitchen managers how they set par levels and at least three will say "experience." That works until the experienced person goes on leave, or the menu changes, or you open a second site and the new manager has to guess. A par level is a number you can work out, and once it is written down, anyone can order against it.

What a par level is

An ordering par is the amount of an item you want in the building right after a delivery arrives. When you place an order, you order up to par: par minus what you have on hand.

The formula most kitchens use:

Par = usage between deliveries + safety stock

Usage between deliveries is how much you go through from the time one delivery arrives to the time the next one does. Safety stock is the cushion for the things that go wrong: a busy night, a late truck, a short shipment, a case that arrives damaged.

A worked example

Take a single item: chicken thighs, delivered twice a week, on Monday and Thursday.

First, find the daily usage. Pull your recipe usage or your last four weeks of invoices and counts. Say the kitchen used 336 lb over four weeks. That averages 12 lb a day, but averages hide the shape of the week, so break it down:

Now find usage between deliveries. The Monday delivery has to last Monday through Wednesday: 8 + 9 + 10 = 27 lb. The Thursday delivery has to last Thursday through Sunday: 11 + 16 + 18 + 12 = 57 lb.

That is already the first lesson. A kitchen that sets one par for chicken thighs, say 45 lb, will carry too much early in the week and run short over the weekend.

Next, safety stock. A reasonable starting point is the usage of one extra day, or a percentage of the cycle usage, depending on how reliable your supplier is and how bad it is to run out. For a core protein on your best-selling dish, running out is expensive, so use something like 20 to 25 percent:

• Monday delivery par: 27 + 6 (about 22 percent) = 33 lb
• Thursday delivery par: 57 + 12 (about 21 percent) = 69 lb

If you count 9 lb on hand when you place the Thursday order, you order 69 − 9 = 60 lb, rounded to the case size. If thighs come in 40 lb cases, you order 2 cases (80 lb) or 1 case (40 lb). Which one depends on shelf life, and that is where perishables and dry goods split.

One timing detail trips people up. You place the order before the truck arrives, often a day before. Whatever you use between the count and the delivery has to come out of the on-hand number. If you count Wednesday morning for a Thursday delivery, subtract Wednesday's expected usage from the count, or set the par to include it.

Perishables vs dry goods

The formula is the same for everything. The cushion is not.

For perishables (fresh protein, produce, dairy, fresh bread), safety stock is limited by shelf life. If raw chicken has three to four days of usable life after delivery in your walk-in, there is no point carrying a week of cover, because the extra gets thrown away. Keep the cushion small, often half a day to one day of usage, and fix problems with more frequent deliveries rather than bigger ones. When the case math forces you to round up, round down instead on items that will not keep, and accept a smaller cushion.

For dry and frozen goods (flour, rice, oil, canned tomatoes, frozen fries), shelf life is rarely the limit. The limits are cash and space. Every case of oil on the shelf is money you already spent. A common approach is a larger safety stock, often a full delivery cycle, because running out of fryer oil is a bigger problem than having two extra cases. Buying in larger quantities for a price break can make sense here, but only if you have the room and it does not push other items onto the floor.

A middle group (cheese, cured meats, eggs, some sauces) lasts long enough to carry a moderate cushion. Treat them case by case.

These are starting points, not rules. A kitchen with daily produce delivery needs almost no produce cushion. A rural site with one truck a week needs much more.

Weekends, events and seasons

Once pars exist per delivery day, the next step is to change them when demand changes.

Weekends are covered if you set pars per delivery cycle as in the example above. If your delivery schedule does not line up neatly with your busy days, build the par from the actual days each delivery covers.

Holidays and events are one-off. The simplest method is to look at what you sold on the same occasion last year, compare covers to a normal week, and scale the par for that cycle by the same ratio. If last Mother's Day did 1.8 times a normal Sunday, scale the Sunday portion of the par by 1.8. Then write a note to reset it the following week. A temporary par that becomes permanent is a common cause of a full walk-in in mid-June.

Seasons shift the menu mix more than the volume. A summer patio may not change total covers much but can swing sales from braises to salads. Check pars at each menu change and at the start of each season, and look at the items whose sales moved most.

Prep pars vs ordering pars

Kitchens use the word par for two different things, and mixing them up causes problems.

An ordering par is about raw product in storage: cases of onions, pounds of chicken. It drives the order guide and is usually managed by the kitchen manager or chef.

A prep par is about finished components ready for service: quarts of diced onion, portions of marinated chicken. It drives the daily prep list and is usually owned by the sous chef or prep lead. We go through that side in the kitchen prep list template.

The two are connected. If the prep par for marinated chicken goes up for weekends, the ordering par for raw chicken has to go up too. When a chef raises a prep par without telling whoever orders, the result is a scramble on Friday afternoon.

Keeping pars honest

A par level is only useful if the count it is compared against is accurate. Count the same way every time, in the same order, by shelf, so you do not miss the case behind the door. Count in the unit you order in, or have a clear conversion (6 lb of thighs on hand is 0.15 of a 40 lb case).

Then watch two signals for each important item. Frequent stockouts mean the par is low or the count is wrong. Regular waste of the same item means the par is high. The food waste log is the easiest place to see the second one.

Review pars on your top 20 items by spend every month. Those items make up most of your inventory value, and tightening them is where pars pay off. The rest can be checked each quarter.

Common mistakes

Setting pars once and forgetting them. Sales move. A par set at opening is probably wrong by month three.

Using a single weekly par for items delivered several times a week. Build the par for each delivery.

Ordering to par without subtracting what will be used before the truck arrives.

Letting par creep up to avoid ever running out. Running out of a side garnish once a month is cheaper than throwing out two cases of it.

Not writing pars down. If the par lives in someone's head, nobody else can order and nobody can check whether it is right. Put it on the order guide next to the item, and update it when it changes. When ordering is done through a shared tool, that is also where pars should live, so every location works from the same numbers.