Employees count every single food item, from an entire pizza to a single breadstick, before putting it in the trash can. The information is loaded onto a database at the end of each night.

It's elementary, but it works, says Seth Salzman, senior vice president of corporate operations for 30-unit Stevi B's. “Anytime you have something printed in black and white, it makes it a little more undeniable,” he says. “You can say, 'Wow, in a week's time, we threw away 25 entire pizzas.'” 

Simply counting wasted pizzas and entering numbers into a database hasn't lowered food costs at the chain; systems devised after analyzing the waste have. “In the buffet business, there's a certain amount of waste, no matter what you do,” Salzman says. “If you're smart up front, you can control it.”

The tracking system is simple. No matter what is thrown out—an ounce of pasta or a single breadstick—it's recorded on a “waste sheet” in each back of the house. At the end of the day, a manager transfers the information from the sheet to the chain's new POS system. The POS system assigns a food cost to each menu item, enabling managers and staff at headquarters to see how much money, in the form of wasted food, was thrown away that day.

Stevi B’s added black containers and several low-cost ingredients such as canned pineapple and garbanzo beans to improve salad-bar margins.

The new POS system was rolled to all 30 Stevi B’s locations in late 2008.

Recording what's been tossed has led Stevi B's to make several operational changes. For instance, waste-sheet analysis revealed that the kitchens were producing too much pizza during slow periods. Now staff makes half-pizzas during slow times and skips some pizzas such as a chicken Alfredo entirely because the sauce doesn't permit making of a half-pizza. Staff also bakes a smaller version of the dessert sweet-roll pizza.

Along similar lines, the analysis showed that some pizzas went uneaten because they didn't hold up well under the buffet lights. The ground beef on a taco pizza dried out. The lettuce on a BLT pizza wilted. Those pizzas are no longer in regular rotation but are available on demand, Salzman says. 

Stevi B's also used the waste sheets to devise a new pizza arrangement on the buffet. Now pizzas are arranged on the buffet in order of food cost—low to high—with the idea that customers will load up first on the lower-cost items. That means the kitchen won't have to produce as many, nor toss as many, of the higher-cost pizzas.

The exception is the chain's signature loaded baked-potato pizza, a high-food-cost item that goes on the buffet first. “It really gets people interested,” Salzman says of the pizza, adding that an employee is on hand in “greeter position” to explain the buffet and the pizzas to new customers.

Franchisee Steve Snelgrove is “amazed” at how well the buffet-arrangement system works in cutting food waste. He predicts that waste reduction will improve more once it becomes second nature to staffers. “It's hard to remember to put them in the right spot, especially during rush times,” Snelgrove says.

Data analysis sparked a new pizza-arrangement system: Lower-food-cost items are put on the buffet first.

The POS system represents a new technological age for the 12-year-old concept. Only in the last two years did the company begin replacing cash registers with electronic POS systems, and only in 2008 did corporate require franchisees to have such systems, Salzman explains. Even so, the previous POS system was “a fancy cash register and also a time clock.”

The exception to the buffet-arrangement rule is the high-food-cost Loaded Baked Potato Pizza, which doubles as a marketing effort.

That helped account for frightening errors, such as one by a franchisee who thought his monthly food costs were off by 20 percent: “He based food costs on deliveries, and he had had five deliveries that month instead of four,” Salzman recalls. “His food costs weren't off—it was the process.”

The new POS system is a custom design now in all five company and 25 franchised locations. It cost $15,000 per store for both installation and equipment (two terminals, each with a printer, and a back-office system). Salzman expects an ROI of a year or less.

Salzman also expects to ramp up the system's use, integrating it with the chain's distributors for easy purchasing and inventory control, and also keeping track of real food costs. For instance, the system will be able to track the food cost of a cheese pizza based on real-time prices of cheese, flour and other ingredients.

“At the end of the day, it's the analytics,” says James Davella, director of foodservice equipment and design at Boston-based Shawmut Design and Construction. But Davella cautions that counting uneaten pizzas is only one side of the waste-control equation. “Portioning dough, toppings—that's more crucial than counting what's wasted.”

MORE: Noodles & Company's waste-management system encompasses more than the kitchen.