Par levels: how to set them so you stop over-ordering

Most kitchens order on instinct — a head chef walks the store, looks at a shelf, and orders what feels right. That works, until it does not: it over-orders the things that feel scarce and under-orders the things that hide at the back. Par levels replace the feeling with a number.

What a par level actually is

It is the quantity you want to have when the next delivery lands. Not the maximum you can hold, and not the minimum before you panic. Order the difference between your par and what is on the shelf, and you have ordered correctly.

The calculation

1. Take your average daily usage from real data — at least four weeks, ideally eight.
2. Multiply by the number of days between deliveries.
3. Add the lead time: if you order Monday and it arrives Wednesday, you need to cover Monday and Tuesday too.
4. Add a safety buffer. About 20% for a reliable supplier, more for one that short-delivers.

Worked through: you use 4kg of onions a day, deliveries come twice a week so 3.5 days apart, lead time is 1 day. That is 4 × 4.5 = 18kg, plus 20% = around 22kg. Your par is 22kg, and each order is 22kg minus whatever is on the shelf.

Where par levels go wrong

• Set from memory instead of usage. Every chef over-estimates the things they hate running out of and under-estimates the rest.
• Never revisited after a menu change. Take a dish off and its ingredients keep arriving for months.
• Ignoring shelf life. A perfect par level on something that lasts four days is a bin-liability, not an efficiency.
• One par all year. Your December par is not your February par, and a seaside venue's summer par is a different business entirely.
• Set per delivery rather than per supplier minimum. If the supplier has a £150 minimum order, your pars have to add up to it or you will pay carriage on everything.

The items worth doing first

Do not par-level 400 lines. Take the twenty ingredients that make up most of your spend — it is almost always about twenty — and do those properly. The long tail can stay on instinct without costing you much.

Par levels are how you stop paying for storage, spoilage and cash tied up in a stockroom. Most kitchens are holding a fortnight of money on shelves they think of as full.

Reviewing them

Quarterly, and after every menu change. Look for lines you have never run out of — those pars are too high — and lines you have run out of more than once, which are too low or have a supplier problem hiding behind them.

FoxEra tracks real usage per ingredient, so pars can be set from what your kitchen actually consumed rather than what anybody remembers.