Operations Planning - What's for Dinner?

Tell me if this sounds familiar:

You get home at the end of a busy day and say to your partner "What do you want to do for dinner?" The reply "I don't know, what do we have?"  You open the fridge and start to think about what you can do with mustard, three mini packs of soy sauce and something that may have been a sweet potato.  Closing the fridge you wonder if you are either a) back in University or b) a contestant on the Food Networks' Chopped.

You have fallen victim to the old adage of the 7Ps, Proper Planning and Preparation Prevents Piss Poor Performance.

To define good performance, let's start with the customer requirement:

Tasty, healthy, balanced meal served promptly at a scheduled meal time.

Gourmet is not a requirement, nor is multi-course, nor is homemade, at least not in my house. Take-out and frozen pizza grace our menu several times a month.  This is not about cooking better.  It's about improving the efficiency of your evening routine.

So how can we help ensure this happens?  First, take a look at how dinner gets to your table.  The obvious answer is, you have to cook it.  But before that you need to prep, store, transport and buy the ingredients.

But before all that, it starts with proper planning and preparation.

Planning meals is a lot like planning jobs in a manufacturing facility.  In some ways, it's much easier.  First off, you control your own demand, which makes it easy to forecast.  It is highly unlikely that you are going to have to feed 2 people one night and feed 25 people the next night without substantial notice.  You also get to pick your product, what you make for dinner is really up to you.

This discussion on planning is going to be highly qualitative in nature.  Unless you are trying to level out your meatball production rates to meet weekly quotas with consistent staffing levels, a quantitative aggregate production plan won't really do you any good.

Why Plan Meals in Advance?

Good question.  First off, it reduces the stress of trying to figure out what to eat when you should just be cooking.  Next, it allows you to shop in advance and have everything you need on hand.  This means less trips to the grocery store, which is more economical and efficient.  You also won't get half way through a recipe only to realize you need a lemon or a potato ricer only to find neither in your cupboard.

How to Plan Meals in Advance?

When you're meal planning you want to look at the three basics of production planning:
1) Production rate - how many people are you feeding and how many meals
2) Workforce level - who's available to cook on any given day
3) Inventory on hand - what do we already have in stock, either finished meals or ingredients.

You'll also want to keep in mind things like economic conditions (can you afford filet mignon three times a week), market demand (does anyone want brussel sprouts) and the availability of raw materials (in-season produce is often tastier and cheaper).

And don't forget the current skill level of your workforce.  If your partner is a five-star Michelin chef, he or she can probably whip up an omelette before hockey practice.  If it's your 15 year old babysitter's turn to get dinner on the table, you may want to order a pizza.

Let's look at some examples:

I have an appointment in the afternoon and my husband won't be home until late that evening.  That means little time to prepare dinner as I also have to keep an eye on the little Monkey and get her to bed.  So this day would be a good candidate for something already prepared in the freezer.

If I don't have anything going on during the day, but the evening is busy then something I can prepare in advance is a good option.  Time to breakout the slow cooker.

We have a group of friends coming over for a weekend BBQ.  We'll know how many we're cooking for and any food restrictions and select a meal accordingly.

Planning Your Menu

In our house planning is done on Sunday morning before our main grocery shop.  We take a look at the calendar (also on the fridge above the menu) and pick meals based on our time and availability during the week.   We'll pull out the cookbooks and recipe cards and pick meals that meet our planning requirements based on time and availability.  Once the meals are planned, the grocery list is made and shopping done (more on that when we look at inventory management).

There are lots of ways you can write out your plan.  Some people just scratch it out on the back of an envelope.  I like to see the whole picture and have a magnet set on the side of the fridge.

Home Made Simple used to offer a printable template for the cards but have pulled it from their website.  Instructions for how you can make your own can be found here: DIY Weekly Menu Planner.  Or look on Pintrest and you'll see lots of meal plan options; magnets, chalk boards, PostIt Notes etc.

This magnet system has some advantages for me.  First, it is easy to rearrange meals if our plans change during the week.  Second, I have our go-to meals pre-printed on the cards, this way I don't have to come up with a new dish every night.  The blank magnets are dry erase sheets so I can easily write in and wipe off meals.  And third, the magnets allow me to pin recipes up under the day of the week, saving me time finding the recipe during the week.

Once the plan is in place, preparation and execution can occur with less stress, less time and less effort.  

And hopefully fewer frozen pizzas.

REFERENCE:

Jacobs et al. Operations & Supply Management 12th ed. McGrawHill Irwin 2009. ISBN 978-0-07-340329-8