Chef Sachin Sangwan
Hospitality consultant Sachin Sangwan brings 13+ years of experience across Accor, Hyatt, and Marriott to expose why high-volume restaurants quietly bleed money. Applying an engineer’s mindset to kitchen operations, he challenges the industry obsession with sales, revealing how unmonitored waste and portion drift silently destroy profitability.
Q. To begin, could you tell us about your journey into the hospitality industry and what inspired you to become a restaurant profit consultant?
Honestly, I never wanted to be a chef. I wanted to be an engineer, that was the plan, that was the dream. But destiny had other ideas, and it pulled me into a kitchen instead. What started as an unexpected turn became a journey I genuinely fell in love with. 13+ years later, across Accor, Hyatt, and Marriott properties, I can say I wouldn't trade it.
And I think that engineering mindset never really left me, it just found a new place to live. I still look at a kitchen the way an engineer looks at a system: process, root cause, efficiency. That's probably what eventually pulled me toward consulting too. Restaurants don't just need a chef; they need someone who can diagnose why something isn't working, not just cook around it.
Q. Many restaurant owners focus on increasing sales. Why do you believe profitability is a more important metric than revenue alone?
Revenue is vanity, margin is sanity. I've walked into properties doing massive covers and still bleeding money because nobody was tracking food cost variance, portion drift, or labor-to-cover ratios. A restaurant doing ₹50 lakh a month at 8% margin is in a worse position than one doing ₹30 lakh at 18%. Revenue tells you demand exists. Profitability tells you whether the business actually works.
Q. What are the three most common mistakes you see restaurants making that quietly reduce their profits?
Recipe cost creep, nobody updates standard recipes when vendor prices shift, so the menu is quietly losing money on dishes everyone assumes are winners.
Portion inconsistency, no SOPs, no photo standards, different cooks plating differently on different shifts, which kills both cost control and guest experience.
Waste blindness, kitchens track sales obsessively but never audit waste, spoilage, or over-production. That's often 4-6% of food cost disappearing silently.
Q. How has technology transformed restaurant and hotel operations over the past few years, and what trends should businesses embrace?
The biggest shift is data visibility, VOG (voice of guest) sentiment tracking, digital training trackers, inventory systems that flag variance in real time instead of at month-end. What used to be a manager's gut feeling is now a dashboard. The trend to embrace isn't flashy AI gimmicks, it’s operational systems that turn kitchen behaviour into trackable, correctable data.
Q. What role does staff training play in improving both customer satisfaction and business performance?
Untrained staff cost you twice, once in quality, once in waste and rework. A well-trained team is the single biggest lever on both customer satisfaction and margin, because consistency is what guests actually notice and remember. I've run structured training programs across 36-person teams, and the correlation between training completion and guest satisfaction scores isn't subtle, it’s direct.
Q. Looking ahead, what major trends do you think will shape the future of restaurants and the hospitality industry over the next five years?
Plant-forward and allergen-transparent menus becoming baseline expectations, not a niche. Tighter integration between guest sentiment data and kitchen decision-making. And consolidation of skill sets, chefs who understand food cost, compliance, and brand standards as fluently as they understand technique will be the ones running multi-outlet operations.
Q. On a lighter note, if you could enjoy one meal prepared by any chef in the world, past or present, who would it be, and what would you order?
That one's easy for me, I've actually had it. Saffron risotto by Marco Pierre White. I got to work with him during a sit-down event at Marriott, and tasting his risotto that day is something I still think about. The precision, the restraint, nothing overdone, just technique doing all the talking. If I had to pick one meal to relive, it would be that plate, exactly as I had it that day.
BIO
Sachin Sangwan is a Restaurant Profit Consultant specializing in helping restaurants and hotels build stronger operations, improve margins, and unlock sustainable growth. Leveraging over 13 years of culinary and operational leadership across global hotel brands including Accor, Hyatt, and Marriott, he brings an engineering mindset to diagnose root-cause inefficiencies in kitchens, banquets, and in-room dining (IRD). Based in India and working with international hospitality businesses, Sachin turns complex operational challenges into scalable, high-margin revenue opportunities.
Interviewed By Vanshika Gupta
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