Seasonal Menu Pricing: Where UK Kitchens Lose GP
Pull out your autumn menu, then go and find the costing sheet behind it. For most kitchens that sheet is months old and the prices written on it are fiction. Here is where the seasons quietly take your gross profit and what stops them.
That gap between the sheet and the invoice is the whole article.
A seasonal menu is one of the few real profit opportunities a small operation still has. Most kitchens leave it on the table. Not because the cooking is wrong. The cooking is usually the strongest thing in the building. It happens because a dish gets costed once, priced once, then left alone while every ingredient in it moves underneath.
A fixed price against a moving cost
Seasonality is a cost story before it is a menu story. Squash and pumpkin are coming in now and they will not be this cheap in March. Partridge came in at the start of this month and pheasant follows on the 1st of October. Blackberries and damsons are everywhere for a few more weeks. British tomatoes are past their best and the price turns as the glasshouses wind down.
None of that is news to you. You buy it every week.
What catches people is the second half. Your price is a fixed number printed on a card. Your cost is a moving number that changes with the weather, the harvest, the fuel price and whatever your supplier paid at market that morning. Fix one against the other for six months and the gap closes on you a penny at a time. Nobody sees a penny. Everybody sees the bank balance at the end of the quarter and wonders what happened.
The menu did not fail. It just stopped being accurate.
Costed once, then never again
This is the single most common leak I find and it is almost never a competence problem. The operator costed the menu properly. They sat down, did the work, built the recipe cards, set the prices. It took a weekend and it was done well.
That was in April.
The dish is still on the menu in October at April's price, built on April's costs. Nobody has looked at it since. Somewhere in there the GP slipped four or five points and there was no moment where it happened. No bad week. No crisis. Just drift.
I have written before about how to cost a recipe from scratch and that piece still holds. This one is about the part that comes after, which is when you do it again. The calculator is not the hard bit. The calendar is.
The invoice price is not the dish cost
Before any of the repricing works, the underlying number has to be right. This is where a lot of costing sheets are wrong from the first day.
The price on your invoice is what you paid for the raw item. It is not what the plated portion costs you. Between the two sits trim, peel, seed, bone, skin, cooking loss and whatever the section throws in the bin without thinking about it.
Squash is the honest example. Peel it, seed it and you are working at roughly 70 per cent yield. If you plate 150g of squash, you did not buy 150g. You bought about 214g. Cost the plated weight and you have missed around 43 per cent of the squash you actually paid for.
On one component of one dish that looks like nothing, but multiply it across every root vegetable, every whole fish, every bone-in cut and every bunch of herbs on a menu and it stops looking like nothing.
Three things have to be true before a costing sheet is worth anything. The portion size on the sheet has to be the portion that leaves the pass, not the portion you intended. The yield has to be measured on your own produce rather than taken from a book, because a January swede does not trim like a September one. The cooking loss has to be in there, because a 200g raw portion is not a 200g plated portion and never was.
Weigh it once properly and you own that number for the season.
A target GP you never check is a wish
Set a target for every dish and for the menu as a whole. That part most operators do. The part that gets skipped is checking the actual against it.
Here is what the drift looks like on a single plate. Take a chicken supreme with squash and greens, priced at £16.50. Costed in October it runs at roughly £2.30 for the chicken, £0.34 for the squash allowing for the trim, £0.55 on potato, £0.34 on greens, £0.95 for sauce and butter and £0.25 for oil, garnish and seasoning. That is £4.73 of food cost, which gives you 71.3 per cent GP and £11.77 of gross profit on the plate.
Leave the price alone until March. The chicken has gone to £2.52, the squash to £0.68, the greens to £0.51. The potato, sauce and garnish have each moved a little too. The food cost is now £5.75. The GP is 65.2 per cent.
Six points, gone, on a dish nobody touched.
In cash it is £1.02 a plate. Once that gap has fully opened, forty of those a week is just over £2,100 a year of gross profit gone. One dish, on a menu of maybe twenty.
Those figures are illustrative rather than market data. The point is not the pounds. It is that the drop happened without a single decision being made.
Specials are a pricing tool, not a leftovers board
The objection I get here is fair. You cannot reprint a menu every time the market moves and you should not try. Print costs money, staff have to relearn it and customers notice.
So do not put the volatile stuff on the printed menu at all.
Anything with a short season or a jumpy price belongs on the board, which means game, wild mushrooms, soft fruit, whole fish and anything else where the price can move twenty per cent in a fortnight. A board can be rewritten on a Tuesday morning for the cost of a chalk pen. A printed menu cannot.
That is what a specials board is for. It is not a place to move stock you should not have bought. It is the part of your menu that is allowed to respond to the market and it lets the printed menu stay stable for the twelve dishes whose costs actually hold.
Price the board the same way you price everything else. A special that gets priced on instinct at service is the most underpriced thing in most buildings.
Which dishes actually pay you
A costing sheet tells you what each dish makes. It does not tell you what your menu makes, because your menu is not sold in equal parts.
You need two numbers side by side. What the dish returns and how many of them go out. A dish with brilliant GP that sells four a week is a rounding error. A dish with mediocre GP that sells ninety a week is your business and six points on that one is worth more than perfection on everything else.
I have gone into the full menu profitability audit elsewhere, so I will not repeat it here. The seasonal version of the job is smaller and you can do it yourself. Take your top five sellers. Just five. Re-cost those at today's prices before you touch anything else, because that is where nearly all of the movement lives.
Most operators start at the top of the menu and work down. Start at the top of the sales report instead.
Your supplier has not held his prices
I spent years on the wholesale side of this industry, so I will tell you how it works from the other end.
Nobody rings you to tell you a price has gone up. The line goes up on the invoice, the invoice gets paid because the delivery is already in the fridge and the week carries on. It is not sharp practice. It is just how a busy trade works when neither side has time to have the conversation.
So have the conversation. Ask for a current price list every quarter, in writing. Ask which lines are fixed and which float. Check three or four of your highest-volume items against a second supplier twice a year, not to threaten anybody but so you know what the market actually is. Anyone worth dealing with expects this and will respect you more for it. I have covered where purchasing quietly overspends in more detail.
A supplier you never question is not a loyal supplier. He is an unchecked one.
What to do this week
None of this needs a project. It needs about two hours.
- Print your sales report for the last eight weeks and take the top five dishes by volume. Those five are almost certainly most of your food revenue.
- Re-cost those five at this week's invoice prices, using plated weights and real yields rather than the numbers on the old sheet.
- Work out the actual GP on each one and put it next to the target you set. Write both numbers down so you can see the gap.
- Fix the worst one. Reprice it, re-spec the portion, change a component or move it to the board. One dish is enough for this week.
- Put a date in the diary for the first week of the next season and do the same five again.
Four times a year is enough. Most kitchens are not doing it once.
The bigger point
Seasonality is usually sold to operators as a creative thing. Better produce, better flavour, a menu that feels like the month it is in. All of that is true and it is the reason most of us cook.
It is also a commercial instrument and it cuts both ways. The same forces that hand you cheap squash in October hand you expensive squash in March and the menu does not know the difference unless somebody tells it.
Your GP did not slip because trade was hard. It slipped because a number went stale and nobody read it. That is a fixable problem and it is fixable this week.
If you would like a second pair of eyes on your menu costings, I offer a free initial consultation. No obligation, no hard sell, just an honest conversation about where your margin is going and what it would take to get it back. If there is nothing I can add, I will tell you that too. You can get in touch here.
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