By Lauren Shanesy

Foodservice can bring in a lot of revenue—but that doesn’t automatically mean your program is profitable. High costs of goods, expensive ingredients, inconsistent portion sizes and a menu with slow-moving dishes can eat away at profitability quickly.

“If you save even a penny per dish, what does that add up to at the end of the year?” said Adrianne Calvo, executive chef, restaurant owner and TV personality.

At the 2025 National Restaurant Association Show, held this week in Chicago, Calvo offered ways that foodservice providers can streamline their menu to directly impact their bottom line.

“The blueprint for being profitable in the restaurant business comes down to menu engineering,” she said. Menu engineering is “the practice of analyzing and designing a restaurant's menu to optimize profitability and enhance customer satisfaction. This involves assessing various factors such as food costs, sales data and customer preferences to strategically position items,” Calvo explained.

Foodservice providers should design their menu around high impact ingredients that provide high margins, good flavor and keep costs low. A few ways she suggested you can accomplish this are:

• Source seasonal ingredients: Buying ingredients that are in season and locally sourced can cut down on costs for both the item itself and the cost to ship, store, freeze or otherwise acquire it. You can also often charge more for a seasonal or local ingredient, as consumers perceive it to have more value.
• Focus on flavor enhancers: Add cost-effective seasoning blends, herbs or spices to your food to elevate flavors without purchasing costly ingredients.
• Offer unique techniques: Give customers a dish they can’t make for themselves at home. Calvo gave the example of her Miami restaurant’s infamous Thor’s Hammer dish. “It’s basically a really big ossobuco that we cook low and slow for hours, braising it in wine, garlic, spices and tomato,” she said. “Offer a cooking technique that is irresistible to consumers and that they won’t recreate themselves.”
• Think about cross-utilization: Calvo always follows the rule of threes—ingredients have to have three uses on her menu in order to make sense. “You need to protect yourself from waste,” she said.
• Use cost-effective proteins: Do research and meet with your suppliers to find cost-effective or underutilized proteins that are less expensive than the standard choices.
• Practice portion control: This doesn’t mean making your portions smaller. Calvo suggested using small amounts of impressive or high-quality ingredients to increase flavor while keeping costs down. “For instance, sprinkling a high-quality cheese or a drizzle of premium oil on a pasta dish can enhance it significantly. I’m still selling a bowl of pasta, which is cheap, but all of a sudden people think they’re getting so much more out of the dish and you can sell it for more, which increases its profitability.”
• Standardize recipes: This is “the crux of running an efficient operation, especially if you do high volume,” she said. Standard recipes with preportioned or measured ingredients can reduce food waste, ensure correct inventory and ordering predictions, and reduce costs. “The way I make a dish and the way my Thursday night cook makes a dish will be different. If I use two tablespoons of garlic, but they use one, how much more garlic am I using and what does that translate to in dollars? That tablespoon of garlic, repeatedly, is going to make a difference to your bottom line at the end of the year. And that doesn’t only help maintain my costs, but it helps with consistency and flavor, so it helps out your brand.”

Presentation of menu items to customers matters too. Calvo recently reevaluated her menu and added a $10 bread service. “We ran a test in which we put the bread basket, a very high-margin menu item, in the middle of the page with a box around it. Without that box, we sold an average of 14 orders of bread during dinner. Now with the box we sell 36. That simple design gets my customers’ eyes right to that item I want to sell,” she said.

And ultimately, don’t be afraid to get rid of low-performing menu items, especially if their ingredients cost a lot to keep on hand. “Take them off your menu. They’re not helping you,” she said.