Kitchen Forms Used by Professional Chefs
Today’s professional chef must be more than a culinary wizard, he/she must also have a solid financial understanding of the business and how to manage the budget, especially if working for a corporation, resort, or large volume restaurant. Knowing how to use Excel gives the chef a huge advantage in this task because then you can create your own task lists, prep lists, evaluation of inventory and so on. Some of the more common forms used by chefs today include: prep lists, station task lists, opening/closing lists, declining balance sheet, inventory sheet to verify food cost, recipe templates, and evaluation forms for your staff.
The format of kitchen forms varies depending upon where you work and upon personal preferences. Some chefs use Word while others use Excel and still others use corporately designed templates or software. I prefer Excel because it is so powerful and easy to manipulate data so most of the forms on this site are done in Excel. Below is an index of some of the kitchen forms available on Chef’s Resources for download to add to your list of kitchen management tools, as well as links to our PDFs and MEMEs.
If you like a form you found on our site Leave a Comment!
Leaving a comment on the page of the form you like helps other people find useful info and tools, and of course, puts a smile on my face!
Chef’s Resources Kitchen Forms & Downloads Index
- Forms Preview – examples of some of the available Excel downloads
- PDF Preview – examples of some of the available PDF downloads
- MEME Preview – examples of some of the available MEME downloads
- Chef Video Tutorials – examples of some of the available Chef video tutorials
- Online Kitchen Management Course – preview of our Chef online course
- Butchering Yields for Beef, Lamb, Pork
- Butchering Yields for Fish
- Cook Evaluation Form
- COVID 19 Sanitation Checklist
- Food Cost Tools
- Food Service Safety Forms (Health Department Forms)
- Kitchen Cleaning Schedule
- Kitchen Staff Schedule
- Kitchen Station Task List Form
- Opening/Closing Duties
- Ordering Guide Templates
- Pre-Shift Meeting Form
- Prep Sheets
- Recipe Templates:
- Baker’s Recipe Template
- Excel Recipe Templates
- How to Make a Recipe Scalable – a Video demo
- Plate Cost Recipe Template
- Sync Inventory & Recipes with Excel – includes a video tutorial using Excel and this workbook
- Recipe Evaluation Form
- Using Excel for Event Planning and Organization
Comments from before Site Migration
Thank you Thank you Thank you. I am a NEWBY Kitchen Manager right out the gate (Culinary School). Overwhelming to say the least. I seemed to have left my memory on the classroom floor. This site brought me back to life. I was a malfunctioning kitchen robot.
VERY USEFUL SITE – WELL DONE
Your site is very helpful for me, I took too much experience from you..thank you so much
Thank you so much for offering such valuable information. Your resources were the missing link in opening our new juice bar. I too am looking for a closing procedure form. If you come across any, please let me know.
Glad you found the form useful Gordon. I would love to see a copy of the form you used in your bakery. I have found that different forms/methods work better for different applications/people. If you don’t mind sharing it use our contact form to get my email (I do this to prevent spammers from getting my email.)
Thanks for making these spreadsheets and info pages available. I am needing to cost some baked goods I plan to make for friends and a few other customers.
I have a very detailed spreadsheet I used when I had a bread shop. It would allow me to input how many of each item I needed for production. The formulas were based on Baker’s percents. But the costing aspect of it was not quite what I needed it to be. I made some of the mistakes you point out in your info pages.
I liked the basic structure of it because it allowed me to easily scale ingredient weights to production needs. Plus, the weights of ingredients were in kgs., lbs., and ozs. So all I had to do was compare the weights needed to the scale output screen. It created consistency whether making one loaf of French Bread or 100 loaves.
good job very useful
Chef Anna – that’s awesome! Hope your venture is both successful and satisfying. No word back yet from Cam. I’ll try to contact him and see if he has time to work on this.
This is awesome! I am starting my own Food Truck and these items are just what I have been looking for. It would be great to have that workbook CAM was talking about. Business Plan info as well. Thank you for sharing. This is a great resource for those of us starting out.
Dave, In my spare time, I may be able to throw together a quick “down and dirty” excel template for a 5 year plan which includes staffing assumptions, revenue assumptions, expense assumptions, capital depreciation and cash balances etc. I’ll get it going and forward it to you for review.
Best Regards
Charlie – unfortunately I do not have any Business Plan Forms on the site yet. I’ll add it to my list of “great topics” for the future.
Hello chef. Do you offer any thing on regard of a restaurant business plan?
Christopher – those forms are located here:
https://www.chefs-resources.com/food-service-safety-health-department-forms
hey chef, do you have any time and temp templates?
Hey Josh! Great to hear from you. No, unfortunately I have no FOH forms. Contact me at work (davidbu@…) and I may be able to send you something helpful.
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Hello!
Very nice information.
Hello, I have a lot of questions. My husband and I mass produce our sauces in our commercial warehouse kitchen but now we are being ask to make other people product which we don’t mind during. But I don’t know how to price their product or scale their product up to a 70 gallon kettle. They can’t make their product with other local co-packers because of he cost which we understand. (Help/Suggestions)!! 🙂