You've heard of them, but they can be a little complicated in application. Pars (the baseline for how much inventory you need on hand at any given time, aka Periodic Automatic Replacement, aka the floor below which an item shouldn't drop before you reorder) can sound simple enough in theory. But across multiple locations with different sales patterns, delivery schedules and vendors, getting your pars right takes real discipline.
Nail them, and you're running leaner, smarter operations. Miss them, and you're either 86ing menu items or losing more cash than necessary. But how do you get the most efficiency out of your pars? And how can MarginEdge SmartPrep help?
To learn a little more about pars, we asked Senior Product Manager Eric Jeffay to give us a breakdown of what exactly pars are and how our new product, SmartPrep, can help your pars process run even smoother. But wait, what exactly is SmartPrep?
SmartPrep is a MarginEdge add-on designed to help kitchen teams run daily prep more efficiently and accurately. Starting with a client’s existing prep list, SmartPrep uses AI to match prep items to recipes and predict how much needs to be prepared based on actual usage, on-hand counts and what has already been prepped.
It also supports multi-day prep planning based on shelf life, gives your crew a simple checklist-based workflow to follow and is built for use on shared kitchen tablets with a quick PIN login similar to a POS.
In addition, SmartPrep supports label printing with QR codes and prep production details, plus barcode scanning for on-hand counts, making it easier for teams to stay organized, reduce guesswork and keep prep moving.
Now that we know a little more about SmartPrep, let’s talk about why knowing and understanding your pars is important:
Now that we’ve gone over the importance of parS, let’s get an even closer look at them and discover how SmartPrep can make your prep process even easier, with a little help from Eric.
Eric’s take: “Pars are essentially the amount of prep required for your team over the shelf life of the recipe, so you don’t have to worry about prepping the same thing every day.”
Think of a par as a smart buffer. Instead of chopping, portioning and batching the same item every single day, you prep enough to carry you through however long that item stays fresh, whether that's two days for a delicate sauce or five days for a hearty stock.
The shelf life sets the ceiling, and the par tells your team exactly how much to make so you hit that ceiling without waste or shortfalls.
When every kitchen works from their appropriate pars, your teams stop guessing, prep less often and produce consistent plates at each unit. That means fewer repetitive tasks eating up labor hours, tighter consistency across the board and a prep routine that actually scales as you grow. Set your pars right, and you turn daily scramble into a predictable rhythm your whole team can count on.
“First, we take your sales data. This feeds into our AI sales forecast, which predicts your sales for the upcoming couple of weeks. SmartPrep takes all of those par predictions and gives them to your team. So they can prep the right amount, see checklists and print labels so that everything in your back-of-house, when it comes to prep, is taken care of.”
MarginEdge pulls in your sales data every night from your POS, and that data flows straight into an AI-powered sales forecast, predicting what you'll sell over the next couple of weeks. SmartPrep then takes those forecasted sales, calculates the par levels your team needs to hit and hands it all to the kitchen in a format they can actually use.
We're talking clear prep checklists, the right quantities already figured out and labels ready to print so every prepped item is dated, identified and organized. Your team doesn't need to do the math; SmartPrep's already done that work for them. The result is a back-of-house that runs with less chaos, less waste and a lot more confidence, no matter how many locations you're managing.
Getting your pars right takes a lot more than guesswork. Start with the basics: factor in your delivery schedule for each item, your actual customer demand from sales data and your average on-hand inventory.
From there, the formula is straightforward: weekly usage plus a safety stock buffer, divided by how many deliveries you get per week. Sales patterns shift, seasonal demand kicks in, vendor schedules change and a par that worked in March can quietly become a liability by June. Review them regularly, especially across multiple locations where each unit can have meaningfully different velocity on the same item.
Shelf life matters just as much as demand; a five-day prep window is very different from a two-day window, and your pars should reflect that reality, not override it.
The good news is that SmartPrep does a lot of this heavy lifting for you, using your live sales data and shelf life settings to keep each location's par calculations grounded in what's actually happening in that kitchen, not what happened six months ago. And with SmartPrep, calculating your pars can go from stressful to chef’s kiss.