Loss Prevention in 2025

Better Loss Prevention in 2025

Three steps QSRs can take right now for easier workflow and better results

by Rachel Auer

As we enter a new year, loss prevention continues to be one of the most popular topics of conversation among QSR owners. Yet, many seem to still be grappling with some fundamental questions on the subject: How do you define loss prevention? What are some sound loss prevention strategies?

On the surface, loss prevention might seem like an HR euphemism for tracking and prosecuting thieves. But it actually refers to all the ways restaurants lose money — from theft and supplier fraud to damage, spoilage, and simple operational errors.

For QSRs looking to streamline loss prevention in a rapidly changing industry, it’s important to understand all the available tactics for preventing these losses — as well as how to approach loss prevention in a more modern and strategic way. What follows are three steps to help you get the year off to a strong start.

Step 1: Start recovering more delivery losses.
One of the hottest trends in loss prevention has nothing to do with theft. It’s revenue recovery from delivery service providers (DSPs). In Delaget’s latest annual Operational Index, we noted these rather telling points regarding the industry’s rapidly evolving sales channels:

• Drive-thru is down 8.1% YOY and hit a six-year low
• Delivery is up 29.8% YOY and up 372% since 2020
• Mobile is up 66.9% YOY and 285% since 2020

With delivery and mobile orders skyrocketing, DSPs will continue to be a major part of the QSR ecosystem. Of course, this trend also signals a rise in the amount of money lost to canceled and adjusted delivery orders. Recovering these losses manually is time-consuming, frustrating, and rarely successful. That’s why so many QSR brands and franchises are modernizing loss prevention efforts with a platform like Delaget +Recovery, which disputes delivery losses automatically and with full transparency into the details.

Proactive DSP revenue recovery is critical for your own bottom line as well as long-term profitability. If delivery losses get too high, it may put a store at risk of deactivation by a DSP. These deactivations often occur without notification, so stores are not even made aware that they are no longer receiving orders from a particular DSP.

Step 2: Regain control of delivery data.
The next phase of modern loss prevention also relates to delivery. Basically, understanding exactly what’s going on with delivery numbers is a serious challenge for most QSRs. This is because they are managing the data manually, spending literally dozens of hours retrieving it from stores.

Manual data analysis is a huge pain, to put it mildly. Cobbling together chunks of data from various stores and time periods makes it very difficult to benchmark performance, connect specific menu items to delivery losses, or understand the scope of missing item orders. Unfortunately, that means critical issues may not get resolved in a timely manner, setting the stage for store pauses or deactivation. Every pause is a loss, and it eats into your margins.

When our clients voice their frustration with manual delivery data reconciliation, we often start a conversation about our Delivery Operations solution. It helps establish a single source of truth for all third-party delivery data, simplifying data management and making it easier to pinpoint problematic locations, track key metrics, and gain insights into DSP outages to prevent loss.

Step 3: Identify and prevent theft.
Just to level set, 75% of employees have admitted to stealing from an employer according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The National Restaurant Association found that 75% of inventory shortages in restaurants are caused by theft.

Theft can take the form of innocuous snacking or frequent soft-drink refills, as well as more serious offenses like giving free meals to friends and family, taking cash from the register, inflating tips, or intentionally ringing up items incorrectly and pocketing the difference.

The problem with theft is that it’s difficult to identify. The amounts can be so small — and the time periods so long — that one system can’t tell the whole story. To discover money taken from the register, for example, a QSR would need to flag an anomaly at the POS, then use video footage to identify the employee, and finally verify everything using a back-of-house time tracking system.

Technology can help here as well. A platform like our Detect solution can make it easier to identify theft as well as differentiate from other types of loss, including poor customer service and understandable mistakes. Imagine a dashboard where you can see loss trends, see which employees are getting flagged, zoom in on transaction-level detail, and view video footage with a visible receipt.

Choose a partner who can bring it all together
All these tools help QSRs do more than save money. Modernizing loss prevention also improves customer satisfaction by reducing delivery errors, increases operational efficiency with less manual intervention, strengthens DSP partnerships, and improves decision-making across the board.

But a thoughtful, integrated approach is critical. This can help QSRs avoid the trap of “analysis paralysis,” where you’re getting too much data to review with no clear direction as to how to act on it. Ideally, QSRs need a way to zero-in on specific loss patterns that have the greatest impact on revenue and the customer experience. Those include frequent order cancellations, missed items, delayed deliveries, and locations being offline and not accepting orders.

This is where Delaget specializes. Not only can we provide technology that streamlines data access and generates real-time insights, but we can also offer strategic guidance on how QSRs can set priorities, develop a realistic plan, and get the most value from their loss prevention efforts.

Here’s to far fewer losses in 2025 and beyond!

Rachel Auer leads product marketing at Delaget, a leading restaurant platform. She writes about delivery app optimization, loss detection and franchisee reporting.