How to Counteract Rising Restaurant Food Costs
Rising food costs don’t have to hamper menu creativity or profitability. Implementing simple changes can help combat rising restaurant food costs.
Adopt Innovative Approaches to Reduce Ingredient Costs
How can successful restaurants maintain the same level of customer experience—food, mood and service attitude—in the face of current challenges such as rising food costs? The short answer: strategic thinking.
Foodservice operators know that supply chain disruptions affect lead time and, consequently, their restaurant’s ingredient costs. Managing food costs is the No. 1 business challenge for operators, followed closely by increasing customer traffic and managing labor costs.1
Strategies such as paring down the menu, incorporating ready-made items and offering high-margin meal add-ons can help operators be savvy and simplify back-of-house operations—all while keeping customers satisfied.
Amanda Gourley, Custom Services Lead at Nestlé Custom Services, is no stranger to helping operators develop strategies and find solutions to cost challenges.
“Nestlé Custom Services offers the Menu Now™ Collection, which is full of ready-made items that can help operators protect against rising costs,” Gourley says. “Plus, our exceptional product development team can work with operators to swap out raw materials, which helps with savings, too. For example, if an operator likes one of our cheese sauces but has requirements around pricing, we can explore a more cost-effective cheese blend.”
Streamline Your Menu
Across the industry, operators are making efforts to stay competitive while managing costs. One way is by paring down their menus. Smaller menus can mean more efficiency, which can help combat rising ingredient prices and lower margins. Consider streamlining your menu to feature only best-selling items.
To understand which items may be eliminated, gather information from staff. Ask questions such as:
- Which menu items are ordered most often and draw rave reviews? Conversely, which menu items are the least popular?
- Are there certain menu items that customers modify consistently?
- What are the least-profitable menu items?
Even with all this information, streamlining your menu can be challenging. Gourley explains how custom menu development from Nestlé Custom Services analyzes menus to see if there are ways to reduce your total SKU count. “For example, we can create a custom base sauce or recommend a product from our Menu Now™ Collection that can be used in different applications,” she says. “This helps one SKU do a lot of work across your menu.”
Rethink Your Pantry
Time is a hot commodity in restaurants. Using ready-made items, like Nestlé Professional Solutions® Ready To Use Butter Style Sauce for pasta, seafood, chicken and vegetables, can shorten lead time without cutting quality.
The products in our Menu Now™ Collection are heat-and-serve and help get customer-pleasing food to the table more quickly, which increases throughput and shortens table turnaround time. Additionally, these products offer consistent flavor and great taste—and there are no order minimums.
Put Trends to Work with Menu Add-Ons
Restaurant experiences remain in demand among customers who want to connect with others over a shared meal.2 What’s more, dining occasions are enhanced when patrons can experience new flavors or fresh iterations of their favorite menu items. High-margin menu add-ons offer customers the option to customize or elevate their meal without putting unnecessary strain on staff. Even better, such menu add-ons can increase check averages.4
Consider the following approaches to build a selection of high-margin menu add-ons:
- Identify multi-use ingredients. The ingredients you already use in other menu items can be turned into enticing side dishes. For example, Nestlé Professional Solutions Four Cheese Sauce can enhance favorites like shareable dips or signature flatbreads.
- Offer an additional salad option or LTO. Restaurants are creating opportunities to entice customers with off-hours or slow-day meal offerings.
- Add more better-for-you choices. With 34% of consumers agreeing that healthfulness or better-for-you qualities increase the value of a food item,3 many operators are planning to add more healthful and nutritious options to the menu.2
- Feature popular desserts. Offer an indulgent treat without adding extra work to the back-of-house by using Nestlé Professional Solutions’ Brownie Batter.
Anticipate Inventory Challenges
Incorporating more shelf-stable items or single-serve frozen pouches means fewer items to work with and less waste. Additionally, making simple swaps can help. For example, replace romaine lettuce with spinach or kale, which last longer and can be used in multiple dishes.
Look for recipes where products such as high-quality, premade sauces might work in place of made-from-scratch sauces, too. The Nestlé Custom Services offers ways to deliver superior taste with less waste, including back-of-house staples such as Nestlé Professional Solutions tomato sauce, hollandaise sauce and cream sauce.
Gourley also notes that if a restaurant consistently has leftover product, like extra burger patties, Nestlé Custom Services can recommend how they use the surplus to make the ingredient go further and reduce waste.
“For one customer, we make a soup base for chili that just has to be opened, heated and the burger meat added to it,” she shares. “If you’re an operator who doesn’t know what your waste will be, a frozen soup base like this is great to keep on hand when you have leftovers to use as needed.”
Keep Cooking with Creativity
In 2025, 86% of foodservice operators saw an increase in food costs over 2024.5 However, higher costs don’t have to hamper menu creativity or profitability. Operators who make proactive decisions around menu size and ingredient swaps can expect to maintain their profit margins. The experts at Nestlé Custom Services are on hand to help restaurants work around rising expenses with access to custom solutions that meet needs on both operational and financial levels.
“The rising cost of food has been tough for operators looking for ways to shorten ingredients lists and reduce BOH time to increase throughput,” Gourley says. “Our goal is to provide kitchen-ready and tailored solutions that give restaurants the opportunity to provide quality, delicious meals that keep guests coming back.”
Connect with the Nestlé Custom Services sales team for custom, expert support to help you optimize your menu and maintain profit margins, even during times of higher costs.
Sources:
- Datassential, Pulse Industry Overview, August 2025
- National Restaurant Association, State of the Industry Report, 2023
- MenuMatters, 2025 Trends, November 2024
- Kinetic 12, Emergence Q4 2022 Report
- Datassential, Industry Overview, August 2025
