Whose role is menu design?

Our food system is amazing. It’s enormous, ridiculously complex, and manages the production and on-time delivery of ingredients for our kitchens, much of which is highly perishable. For most of the last twenty years it has produced affordable food at an incredibly stable price. But the past few years have been different. Geopolitics, Brexit, Covid and climate change have generated a different world of food supply, one where availability, quality and cost have become much less reliable. This position is improving, but whilst price is easing it is doing so very slowly, and the word volatility will in my view, still be in use for the foreseeable future.

To counter these challenges, I think that as a sector we should focus much more on the link between sourcing and menu planning. At the heart of this opportunity is the way that we create our own barriers through the way we think about ingredients.

The first thing we need to do is to stop exclusively thinking about food as “products”. The economic world in general is now fully aligned with the concept that manufacturers make products, and consumers buy them. At face value this process is very useful – manufacturers make stuff to a standard formula which makes it economic and enables effective quality controls, and consumers get predictable outcomes at affordable cost.

In food and drink we have certainly become very comfortable with manufactured products too – from Corn Flakes to bottled Mayonnaise, from Ketchup to Digestive biscuits. But food is not just manufactured products – food is a natural product of the planet, and by its very nature is highly vulnerable to a large number of variables, particularly weather. Somehow, we have lost the feeling that it is OK if something is unavailable because of one of these variables.

This way of thinking extends further to our menu design within hospitality. In our desire for control and predictability we standardise recipes and ingredients often losing sight of the realities of production of the food itself. In turn the need for 12-month availability of “product” has magnified the globalisation of our supply chains.

This globalisation has some hidden consequences. Firstly, it puts us in a mindset that for food supply chain “seasons” don’t exist anymore, and that there is always a cheaper option if you look for lower cost geographies. Want asparagus in January? “Certainly sir, we’ll book the flight now”. Want chicken supremes at 20% lower cost? “We can do that for you!” We can falsely see the whole world as our larder, with any “product” we want available at any time we like.

Of course, this is theoretically true…but it conceals seasonal fluctuations, increases vulnerability of supply from events way out of our control, raises cost risk, and often ignores variances in quality, flavour, and freshness, not to mention environmental and welfare standards.

But perhaps more critically, it sets a paradigm that all ingredients are equal in the eyes of the menu planner. Suppliers average out the cost of product over time to give operators the commercial certainty that they desire to easily manage GPs, but in doing so the operators actually pay more by using many products whose higher price when out of season/or scarce of supply is disguised by this practice. And buyers seek to “engineer” ingredients to hit a pre-agreed GP margin. This process of commoditisation generates a race to the bottom as it self-perpetuates the idea that all product is equal.

So, what is the alternative? Last week I sat in a meeting within a restaurant chain where the Supply Chain representatives and the Operations guys were airing a variety of issues on ingredients – including cost increases, quality issues, and availability challenges. These were all related to seasonal problems, but whilst there were lots of creative discussions about improving the supply situation no-one questioned whether the use of these ingredients out of season might be bettered by replacing them on the menu.

All too frequently, I have seen examples within operators of supply professionals simply being emailed the specification of ingredients within recipes that have already been decided upon. And I have seen those same supply people assume that it is not their job to collaborate to create menus that reflect the very best ingredients with the minimum of commercial risk. As a sector we need to demand more of our procurement people and support their development to be use their skills and knowledge to be actively involved in creating the menus of the future.

We are in a new world all of this will need to be much more dynamic. To make that happen, great menu design should in the future be a team game, with all the skills in the room fully utilised.