Most of it is not stolen. It leaves in a bin bag, in a laundry trolley, or in somebody else outside caterer’s crate — and marking is what brings it back.
Your stock take says you are 92 spoons short. Nobody in the kitchen can explain it, nobody is obviously to blame, and the same thing happened last quarter. If you run a hotel, a restaurant, a school dining hall or an outside catering operation, this is a conversation you have had more than once.
Here is the uncomfortable and slightly reassuring truth: most of it is not theft.
Where cutlery goes
Track it properly and the same four routes come up every time.
The bin. A plate is scraped fast during a service and a fork goes into the waste with the leftovers. Nobody notices, nobody could have. At a 200-cover service this happens more often than anyone believes until they check the bins for a week.
The laundry. Cutlery wrapped in a napkin goes into the linen trolley and comes back from the laundry, if it comes back at all, in somebody else's bundle.
The other caterer. This is the big one for anyone doing events. Two outside caterers work the same wedding, everything goes into crates at midnight in the dark, and the split is approximate. Nobody stole anything. The forks are simply at the other company's store now, and the other company is equally sure they are theirs.
Genuine walking. It happens, and it is the smallest share.
Not a discipline problem: tightening supervision does nothing about the bin, the laundry or the crate at midnight, and it poisons a kitchen. The problem is that a spoon is anonymous, and that is fixable.
What a mark changes
A laser mark on stainless is not a coating or a sticker. The beam alters the surface of the steel itself, so it survives a commercial dishwasher, scouring pads, and years of service. Put your name or a short code on the handle end of every piece and four things change at once.
Most hotel cutlery is sold as 18/10 or 18/0 stainless. The numbers describe the alloy: according to the cutlery maker Viners, 18/10 is 18% chromium and 10% nickel, while 18/0 has no nickel at all. Different steels take slightly different laser settings, which is one reason the first piece of every batch is a test.
- The crate at midnight stops being a guess. Sorting is by eye, in seconds, and both caterers go home with what they came with.
- The laundry has an owner. Marked pieces come back because there is a name to send them to.
- The bin becomes visible. When a marked fork turns up in the waste, that is data, and it usually leads to changing where the scraping happens, not to blaming anybody.
- Casual walking stops. Not because anyone is caught, but because a marked spoon is worth nothing to take.
The numbers, plainly
Take a mid-size kitchen with 600 pieces of cutlery in circulation and a replacement cost of KSh 120 a piece. Losing 15% a year (not a bad year, an ordinary one) is 90 pieces, about KSh 10,800, every year, forever. Marking the same 600 pieces at KSh 20 an item is KSh 12,000, once. Halve the loss and it has paid for itself inside two and a half years, and it keeps paying after that.
The marking itself is quick. It is done in place, between service periods or overnight, because sending a kitchen's cutlery away is not something any operation can do.
One caution on the arithmetic: do not count the pieces you think you have. Count the pieces that come out of the drawer on the day. Almost every kitchen that has done this discovers the circulating stock is smaller than the inventory says, because the inventory records what was bought and nobody ever subtracted the losses. That gap is itself the argument, and it is better found before you order a replacement batch than after.
What else is worth marking while the machine is there
The engraver is on site for a day either way, so the cutlery is rarely the whole job. Chafing dishes, serving platters, cooler boxes and the crates themselves all disappear the same way and mark the same way. So do the trolleys.
For anything that travels between venues, engraved security seals do the other half of the job: a numbered seal on a crate means the count at the far end can be checked against the count at this end, and a broken seal is a question you can ask the same night, not at the next stock take. The keyholders for the store rooms usually get done at the same time, for the same reason.
Sources: Viners, 18/10 and 18/0 stainless steel (read 14 Oct 2026).
Common questions
Will laser marking affect food hygiene?
The mark is in the metal itself, not a coating, an ink or an adhesive, so there is nothing to flake off or harbour residue. It is placed at the handle end away from the eating surface, and the piece washes exactly as it did before. This is why commercial kitchens mark the metal instead of using tape or printed bands.
Can you mark cutlery we bought from different suppliers?
Yes. Mixed stock is the normal situation and the machine is set per batch of material, not per supplier. Different steels take slightly different settings, which is why a test piece is always marked first. Bring the odd pieces out of the store as well; the ones nobody uses are the ones that end up in somebody else's crate.
How long does 600 pieces take?
Comfortably a day on site, usually less. The marking is fast; the pace is set by how quickly pieces can be brought to the table and taken away again. Kitchens that put one person on the flow finish well ahead of kitchens that expect the engraver to fetch and carry.
What should the mark say?
Shorter is better. A hotel name, or an abbreviation of it, is enough for sorting, and it is what makes a piece worthless to take. Add a department code only if you genuinely move stock between outlets and need to know which kitchen a piece belongs to. Do not put a year on it: you will replace pieces and the marks will stop matching.
