Every additional supplier adds a delivery window, an invoice, and a quality risk. Procurement leads at hotel groups have started doing the maths.
Most hotel groups we audit are running between five and nine suppliers across fresh, dry, frozen, ethnic specialities, beverages, equipment, cleaning and amenities. On the surface, this looks like prudent supply-chain diversity.
On the kitchen floor, it looks like nine delivery windows, nine invoices, nine sets of compliance documents, and nine account managers to keep happy. Each one is a small cost that disappears into someone's overhead.
We've consolidated estates of nine suppliers down to one or two. The savings aren't mostly in unit prices — they're in labour overhead, in stockouts avoided, and in the chef hours you stop spending chasing wrong deliveries.
The average kitchen-prep time saving is 60%. That number is repeatable because the underlying mechanism is repeatable.