Three leaks, none of them large
Sixty smalls at five ounces, two to a pitcher: thirty pitchers, each pulling ten and a half ounces for ten ounces of drink, plus four tenths clinging. Ninety mediums at eight ounces, one at a time: ninety pitchers pulling 8.9 for eight. Forty larges at twelve: forty pitchers pulling 12.9 for twelve.
That is 1,644 ounces pulled and 1,500 poured. A hundred and forty-four ounces a day — 1.125 gallons — goes down the sink. At 4.60 a gallon that is 5.18 a day and 36.23 a week, from a bar that is doing nothing wrong.
Where the pitcher minimum bites
With the defaults it does not bite at all, because every pitcher is already carrying more than the five ounce minimum. Change the smalls to one at a time and it appears immediately: a single five ounce drink wants 5.5 with the margin, which clears the minimum, but drop the small size to four ounces and now the pitcher has to hold five for a four ounce drink and a full ounce is tipped every time.
That is the case worth checking if you sell a small enough size. It is also why the four ounce cortado is the drink most likely to be losing money without anyone noticing.
Batching is the only free lever
Two smalls to a pitcher rather than one takes the smalls from 54 ounces of waste a day to 27. Three takes it to 18. The fixed 0.9 ounces per pitcher gets divided by more drinks each time, which is the whole mechanism, and it has diminishing returns exactly as you would expect.
It also has a cost the arithmetic cannot see. Milk steamed for three drinks sits while the second and third are built, and by any account it is not the same as milk poured straight away. Where the line is depends on what you are selling and how fast the bar moves, and no page can put a number on it.
What this does not count
Milk that goes out of date, milk left in a jug at the end of service, and the gap between the ounces on the recipe card and the ounces actually poured. In most cafes those are bigger than everything modelled here. They are also a stock-taking problem rather than a calculation, which is why they are absent rather than estimated.
Questions people ask
How much milk does a cafe waste steaming?
With the defaults on this page, 144 fluid ounces a day out of 1,644 pulled — 8.8 percent, or 1.125 gallons. That comes from the margin poured so as not to come up short, the milk clinging in the pitcher at the rinse, and any pitcher that had to be filled above what its drinks needed. Your own figure moves most with how many drinks you steam per pitcher.
What is the minimum amount of milk you can steam in a pitcher?
It depends on your pitcher and your wand and it is a field on this form rather than a number the page supplies. Measure it once with water: fill until the tip is properly under the surface and read it off. It matters because any drink smaller than that minimum forces you to pull more milk than the drink takes.
Does steaming two drinks at once save milk?
Yes, and the saving is arithmetic rather than opinion — the fixed loss per pitcher gets divided across more drinks. Going from one small at a time to two halves the waste on smalls; going to three takes off another third of what is left. What the page cannot tell you is whether the second and third drinks are as good, since the milk sits while they are built.
What should I put in a drink cost for milk?
The ounces bought, not the ounces poured. With the defaults, drinks average 8.33 ounces poured but 9.13 bought, and the second figure is the one that leaves the bank account. Using the recipe card figure understates every drink cost in the menu by the same percentage, which is exactly the kind of error that survives for years.
Does this include milk that goes off?
No, deliberately. Spoilage, jugs discarded at close and the drift between the recipe card and what actually gets poured are usually larger than everything counted here, but they are a stock-taking question rather than an arithmetic one and any figure this page invented for them would be fiction.