Sometime in early 2026, the United States and Iran went to war. Not the kind of war that ends in weeks. The kind that closes the Strait of Hormuz, and when the Strait of Hormuz closes, LPG shipments to India slow to a trickle. When LPG slows to a trickle, commercial kitchens start rationing. When kitchens start rationing, the question stops being what to cook and starts being whether to cook.
That was our reality for a stretch of weeks that I would rather not relive.
We managed to switch to electric. It was not a clean switch. It was an expensive, improvised, cable-and-induction-cooktop kind of switch that the kitchen team made work through sheer stubbornness. So that problem, at least, got solved.
Then the second problem arrived.
The biggest corporate client we serve announced work from home for their employees because they could not arrange lunch for their staff. They were not alone. A cluster of companies in the area made similar calls. And with that, our footfall dropped by more than half, almost overnight. On a normal week, our numbers sit around 50 transactions. That stretch, we were doing significantly less. Not because we had made a mistake. Not because the food got worse. Because the world had rearranged itself and taken our lunch crowd with it.
You can only control so much.
What you can control is what you do next.
When sales numbers drop sharply and you cannot blame the food or the team, you start looking at the other side of the ledger. You stop asking how much you are bringing in and start asking how much you are losing on the inside. That is when we started taking wastage counts seriously. And inventory counts. And the relationship between the two.
Here is the honest version of what we found: there was no single item bleeding us dry, no obvious villain in the walk-in. What we found was something less dramatic and harder to fix. We had guesses where we should have had numbers. We knew roughly how much flour we went through in a week. We did not know precisely. We knew the cold brew batch sizes. We did not know how often a batch went past its window and got poured out. Nobody was hiding anything. The counts simply had not been a priority when business was good and everything was moving.
When business slowed, the counts became the most important thing we were doing.
This is not an unusual story for restaurants. Most places that have been open for a year or two would tell you the same thing. The uncomfortable part is that we had always known this was a gap. The Valentine’s Day service in February, which I wrote about separately, had already shown us what happens when you run a busy service on instinct and goodwill instead of systems. Inventory was the same problem, just playing out more quietly and over a longer period.
So we decided to fix it properly. Not with a notebook. Not with a spreadsheet that someone updates when they remember. We had already built our own POS system from the ground up, a decision that had seemed like overkill at the time and now looked like the smartest thing we had done. That same team is now integrating an inventory module directly into the POS. Every item that leaves the kitchen will connect back to what was used, what was prepped, and what was left. The wastage count will not be a separate exercise that someone does at the end of a tired shift. It will be part of the same system that processes the transaction.
I want to be clear about how this is going. It is not going smoothly. The integration is messy. There are days where the spec changes because we discovered something about how the kitchen actually runs that does not match how we had modeled it on paper. The team building it is patient. We are not. That tension is probably healthy, but it does not feel healthy in the middle of it.
Large restaurant chains do this through vendors. They spend months in evaluation, bring in consultants, run pilots across test outlets, and roll out after eighteen months of preparation. I have seen the process from the outside. It is thorough and it is expensive and it moves at the pace of a large organization making a large decision.
We do not have that luxury and, it turns out, we do not need it. We have a small team that can change a decision in an afternoon. We have a POS system that belongs to us, so there is no vendor negotiation required to add a module to it. When something does not work, the person who built it is sitting close enough that we can show them exactly what does not work. The cycle from problem to fix is measured in days, not quarters.
That is the only real advantage of being small. You move when you decide to move.
The inventory system is not live yet in the form we want it. But we are counting every day. We know where we stood last week, and we know where we stand today. That alone is more than we had before the Hormuz crisis forced the question.
Sometimes the things that shake you loose are the things you were not expecting to be grateful for.