Ask any trader what their best-seller is and you will get an instant answer. Ask what sold between two and three on a wet Tuesday compared with the same hour on a packed Saturday, and the answer gets vaguer — which is a shame, because that second number is usually the one that decides what you should have prepped.
Why the headline best-seller misleads
A best-seller is an average across every trading condition you have ever worked. It folds a wet market day into a summer festival and hands you one number. Prep is not an average decision, though. It is a specific one, made the night before, about a specific day.
Two patterns turn up over and over once trading is broken down properly:
- Weather flips the mix, not just the volume. The item that carries a hot Saturday is often not the item that carries a cold wet one. Most traders know this in their bones and still prep as if volume were the only variable.
- The shape of the day differs by site. A festival has a lunch spike and an evening spike. An office pitch has one hard hour. A market day trickles. Same total, completely different prep and staffing.
Prep against the average and you over-prep the thing that does not sell today and run out of the thing that does — both at once, on the same day.
What is actually worth knowing
You do not need a data project. Four things cover most of it:
- Sales per item, per hour. Not the daily total. The hour is where the pattern lives.
- What ran out, and when. The item you sold out of at 1pm is not your best-seller — it is your most under-prepped one, and the two look identical in a daily total.
- What went in the bin. The quiet cost. Nobody enjoys recording it, and it is usually the fastest saving available.
- The conditions. Site, weather, day of the week. Three words in a note turns a number into something you can use next time.
A notebook genuinely works
This is not an argument that you need software to do it. A notebook and a bit of discipline will get you most of the way, and plenty of very well-run vans work exactly that way.
The catch is that the notebook gets filled in at the end of a twelve-hour day, by someone who has been on their feet since six, from memory. The per-hour detail is the first thing to go, and it is the part that mattered.
That is the case for having it recorded as the orders come in rather than reconstructed afterwards. Eventifood breaks trading down by item and by time slot while you are serving, so the pattern is sitting there at the end of the day instead of being something you have to remember. You can see how that works here.
Start with one question
If all this feels like a lot, pick one question and answer it for a month: what did I throw away, and on what kind of day?
Waste is the easiest pattern to spot and the one with the most obvious money attached. Once that is answered, the next question tends to suggest itself — and it will be a better one than any generic list of metrics, because it will be about your van.
What do you currently use to work out what to prep: a gut feel, a notebook, or something else?