How to increase the profitability of your menu

Updated May 2025

Let’s be honest: running a profitable kitchen in today’s climate can feel a bit like spinning plates – in a hurricane. With rising costs, staff shortages, and customers’ expectations increasing on a much lower budget, keeping your margins healthy is tougher than ever.

But here’s the good news – you can make your menu work smarter (not harder) with a few strategic tweaks. That’s where our Unlock Your Menu campaign comes in. We’re here to help you turn your dishes into margin-boosting powerhouses – without compromising on quality or creativity.

Let’s dig into a few top tips that’ll help you to increase the profitability of your menu…

Know your star dishes to increase the profitability of your menu

It’s time to get analytical. Use menu engineering to evaluate each dish – not just by how popular it is, but how profitable it is too. You’d be surprised how often the most-ordered dish lowers your margins.

What is menu engineering?

Menu engineering is the process of analysing and optimising your menu to increase profitability by focusing on pricing, food costs, and customer preferences. By understanding your menu’s performance and making data-driven adjustments, you can highlight high-margin dishes, streamline your offerings, and design an experience that encourages customers to order more strategically.

Bidfood’s Menu Management tools, including the MyRecipes & Menu Planning feature in Bidfood Direct, make this process easier than ever. This intuitive tool lets you build recipes using live product data – from allergens and nutritional values to real-time costs – helping you maintain accurate gross margins, even as prices fluctuate.

With clear cost reports at your fingertips, you can quickly identify your “stars” (high profit, high popularity) and “non-stars” (low profit, low popularity), and make informed, cost-effective decisions about what to promote, reprice, or remove.

2. Spotlight the right dishes

Design your menu to do some of the heavy lifting. There’s a bit of psychology involved here – how you list dishes, where you place them, and even what you call them can influence what customers choose. Highlight your most profitable dishes using visual cues (think boxes, icons, or chef’s hats) and give them pride of place.

Small tweaks like these can significantly increase the likelihood of customers choosing higher-margin meals – win-win!

3. Tackle rising costs with smart swaps

With inflation still biting, it’s more important than ever to manage costs at ingredient level. That doesn’t mean sacrificing quality – just being clever with your choices.

Try:

• Swapping out expensive ingredients for cost-effective alternatives (Bidfood’s Everyday Favourites is a great place to start).
• Making better use of your store cupboard staples to cut down on waste.
• Batch-prepping items across multiple dishes to increase efficiency and using ingredients in multiple dishes, for example utilising tomato sauce for your pizzas also for your pasta sauce.

Need inspiration? Our cooking with Bidfood page is full of ideas and seasonal insights to help you keep your dishes exciting, affordable and delicious. For more support building your menus and recipes sign up to Bidfood Direct and explore our MyRecipes menu planning tool.

4. Waste not, want not

Food waste doesn’t just cost the planet – it costs your kitchen, too. Over-portioning, over-ordering, and poor stock rotation all eat into your bottom line.

We’ve got a whole section on reducing food waste that’s packed with practical tips to help you waste less and profit more. Portion control tools, freezer-friendly ingredients, and simple prep tricks can all make a difference. Coming very soon is our new food waste solution guide.

Stuck on food waste recipe ideas? Here are a couple of choices to get you started:

5. Flex your menu more often

To stay profitable, it is important to flex your menus to the seasons, supply chain, and customer habits. Shorter menus with more frequent refreshes are easier to adapt and optimise. For example, explore different flavour cheesecakes to coincide with the seasons.

Oranges are at their ripest in spring, so that’s the perfect time to serve a crème brûlée orange cheesecake, created by our Food Innovation Manager, Martin Eshelby. This can easily be adapted to summer berries in summer and winter fruits for the colder months, such as cranberries or blackberries. Making these simple seasonal tweaks will help keep your menus refined but exciting and fresh.

Bidfood have made this easier than ever for you – from our trending ingredients to seasonal product guides, we’ve got your back when it comes to what’s trending right now and future predictions.

Ready to increase the profitability of your menu?

There’s no one-size-fits-all approach, but a profitable menu starts with understanding what’s working – and what isn’t. Use our tools, tap into our resources, and remember, a few small changes can make a big impact on your bottom line.

For more guidance, inspiration and expert advice, head over to the full Unlock Your Menu page.
Let’s make every plate count – profitably.