If you run a restaurant, you already know your menu is more than a list of dishes. It’s your identity, your sales engine, and sometimes your biggest challenge. If you’re wondering what menu planning is, what it involves, and whether hiring a restaurant consultant is worth the cost, here’s a straightforward look.
What is menu planning?
Menu planning is the process of deciding which dishes appear on your menu, how they’re priced, how often they change, and how they align with your kitchen, staff, and customer preferences. It’s part creativity, part logistics. The right menu can boost profit margins, reduce waste, and improve kitchen flow. The wrong one can do the opposite.
Smart menu planning also takes into account the size of your kitchen, your labor availability, your suppliers, and your local market. Seasonal ingredients, regional tastes, dietary trends, and even weather patterns can all play a role in what dishes make the cut – or get cut.
What does menu planning look like in a restaurant?
In practice, menu planning means:
- Choosing dishes your kitchen can execute consistently
- Balancing popular, profitable, and labor-efficient items
- Keeping ingredient overlap in mind to control food costs
- Reflecting your brand and appealing to your local market
- Pricing items correctly based on portion cost and demand
- Adjusting for seasonality and supply chain reliability
- Offering enough variety without overwhelming the kitchen or customer
Menu planning is not a one-and-done task. It’s a living process that should evolve with your operation, your team, and your guests’ expectations. For multi-location brands, menu planning also includes decisions about standardization, regional variations, and rollout timelines.
Does a restaurant consultant handle menu planning?
Yes. A good restaurant consultant doesn’t just suggest ideas – they work with your team to align the menu with your kitchen’s capabilities, your customer base, and your financial goals. If your prep room is already maxed out, they won’t add a dozen new from-scratch items. If your signature dish isn’t profitable, they’ll help you fix it – or replace it.
They’ll look at your menu holistically, considering:
- Prep complexity and staffing levels
- Inventory management and vendor relationships
- Kitchen layout and station capacity
- Order timing and ticket speed
- Profit contribution of each item
- Cross-utilization of ingredients
At Chef Services Group, we also bring manufacturing and R & D experience to the table. So if your chain has a signature sauce, soup, or rub that’s dragging down prep efficiency, we can help scale and outsource it without losing consistency. That’s not something every consultant can offer – but it’s often a game changer.
And if you’re considering innovation in cooking techniques, our Sous Vide training & systems can help you improve consistency, quality, and throughput across high-volume items. Looking to centralize production? Explore our Cook Chill Production consulting to support commissary operations.
How much does menu consulting cost?
It depends on the scope. Some consultants charge hourly, others offer project-based pricing. You might pay a few thousand dollars for a one-time menu revamp, or more for a long-term engagement that includes testing, costing, sourcing, training, and rollout.
If your needs are straightforward – say, you want to simplify your menu and improve cost control – the engagement might be relatively quick and affordable. If you’re building a new concept from the ground up or preparing to franchise, expect more depth, and a higher investment.
The more important question: how much is a poor menu costing you right now? If you’re seeing slim margins, food waste, long ticket times, or inconsistent customer satisfaction, improving your menu might be the most profitable investment you make this year.
When should you consider hiring a menu planning consultant?
Here are a few signs it might be time:
- Your food costs are higher than industry benchmarks
- You’re not sure which dishes are actually profitable
- Your team struggles to keep up with prep and service
- You want to grow or franchise but don’t know how your menu scales
- You’ve had customer complaints about food quality or variety
- You’re planning a rebrand or concept refresh
Menu planning consultants bring objectivity, experience, and outside perspective – all of which are hard to find when you’re in the middle of the day-to-day grind.
If your menu needs a fresh set of eyes – or if you’re planning a revamp, rollout, or scale-up – a menu planning consultant can help. And if you’re looking for someone who understands both the creative and operational side of menu development, let’s talk. Chef Services Group is ready to support you at every step.
Walter and Leah worked in our newly developed retro dinner for 4 months. There work was thorough and offered us numerous insights to improve our operations, services, kitchen systems and great menu items that are profitable.
Chef Services is the total restaurant development package, a hands-on consultant throughout the creative and opening phases of the restaurant development from operating systems to food and menu perfection.
When I needed to change the theme of my restaurant and bring new innovative products to our menu and design changes I engaged the Chef Services for these results. For my Latin Grill in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia from menu, logo to equipment selection and training in the Middle East the CSG team followed us through to opening.
Walter came to Slade Gorton in 2001 – 2013 and brought innovation and vision to our line of seafood products “Gourmet Bay”. The culinary, nutrition and food science resource Chef Services brought to our development of new products is what gave us a very high level of competitive products. The creative genius delivered home run products for our fresh valued add line of fish products, Bourbon Salmon, Toasted Crumb Line, Salmon Burger line, and many other great flavor concepts that still perform for us in the market place.
Walter and the Chef Services Group team were the perfect fit for our culinary consulting needs. From menu brainstorming sessions to hands on training, CSG was able to bring our ideas to life. Without there level of resources our identity, menu, recipes and operational design would have been approached much differently. Walter’s particular expertise allows him to keep operational efficiencies in mind throughout the food creation process.
Very professional. Excellent at organizing and structuring projects.
I found working with Walter was much more than a project for him. Walter and his team where passionate and treated my project as their own. To this day I know if I need anything I can count on Walter and his team to deliver. Throughout this project I learned it was difficult to determine if companies, consultants, individuals, etc. where acting on their own behalf for the money only, or if they really cared if you are successful or not. Walter and his team care.
Thorough and very reasonably priced. Very good deliverables and professional in approach, innovative and practical implementation and training material that delivered. Recommend with confidence that Chef Services can do the job.
Chef Services is a wonderful group to work with. Any project we’ve had them do for us has been more like a partnership. They genuinely care about our success with the products/systems they have worked on. They are excellent communicators. Project expectations, timelines and costs are clearly laid out at the start. This has been a great alliance for us and we will continue to use Walter and his team in the future.
I’ve always relied on Chef Services Group for food product innovation and development. Walter’s unique combination of Culinary and Food Science credentials allows him to seamlessly transition from stove-top recipes to full-scale commercialization. His expertise includes frozen food, cook-chill soup, sauces, dressings, seafood, meat, and USDA-compliant value-added meals. Beyond creating winning products, he ensures smooth scale-up with complete, scalable formulations and clear assembly steps. Walter’s deep understanding of manufacturing and his ability to provide NLEA Nutrition Fact Labels make him an invaluable partner for any food development project.
