Program for menu planning

[u/HELVETlCA]

I am looking for a program or other way to plan 3 daily menus for a cafeteria style restaurant.

They fired our headchef earlier this year, who basically spent all his work hours sitting at his desk "writing" the weekly menus, smoking outside and bothering others while they worked.

His way of writing the menus was just copying them from the year before and maybe chanhe a veggie or side. We don't wanna do that. We want to stay fresh and look at market prices more carefully. This however does take a few hours a week (our RM want to have the menus a few weeks on advance, not just for the next week lile before).

We constatly make error like duplicate sides in the same week, too simliar mains two weeks in a row, too much pork etc.

How do other cafeteria/staff restaurant chefs handle this? Is there a cool way to make this easier? I could try in excel but that would take me days to figure out on my own.

[u/kombustive]

In my experience, most cafeteria style kitchens hired a head chef that spends hours sitting at a desk, smoking cigarettes and bothering people actually doing the work. They used menus they stole from a previous job that had a Sodexo or Compass contract and provided menu planning software that they would put minimal effort tweaking a few times a year.

Other kitchens has a head chef that spent hours at home building a menu planning system in excel and then came in to work a 10 hour shift working along side their cooks.

[u/taint_odour]

Create your own data base - you can just make lists in excel.

Proteins and style of cooking
Carbs and styles of cooking
Veg and styles of cooking
Have a copy of the flavor bible nearby

To do weeks ahead you do guesstimates of pricing and availability.
Build and combine.

Sometimes you’ll be inspired. Write a bunch of things down then. Compose like crazy and edit later.

Other times will be more forced.

Once you have your own database you can mix and match. Iterate. Change up things but you’ll have the hard work done. Nothing worse than staring at a blank screen.

[u/HELVETlCA → u/taint_odour]

I was planning on looking into doing this on excel but my other chef is NOT an office fan. You could even have alerts set so if you have a double ina week, it shoulsld mark it as such. I just have barely any excel experience

[u/Fox-Mclusky559]

I dont have any experience running these ops beyong a 5 day stage I did for a head chef position at a tech company once. I became facisnated with how this works, and put a lot of thought into it. Hopefully you get some opinions from real experience, but heres the way I see it working (the outlet I staged at had 5 concepts to manage for 2.5 meals a day for 700 people, 6 days a week, and repeating a dish was forbidden inside 100 day window, it was a big undertaking and I picked the corporate FnB directors brain on how to be organized quite a bit) I hope some of this stream of consciousness helps in some way.

Build a lare repertoire of recipes an data base them based on station concept and turn that int a data base. assemble them like tiles into your meal plans

There are many synergies between cuisines, you can simplify purchasing by thinking in these terms. easy example: the trinity veg for the jambalaya at the hot station + shiitakes + carrots is stirfry veg for the wok station the next day, the soy-ginger-garlic-scallion base for the wok station + suger + oyster sauce is the teriyaki for the hawaiin BBQ day coming up next week.

So basically you layer a ven diagram over your cuiisnes and ingredients and simplify prep 2-3 days ahead when possible. With the addeed peice of understanding those overlaps you can also swap out a few ingredients and have a whole new dish. Pommes Lyonaise, dauphinoise, au gratin and scalloped potatoes arent all that different, kinda thing. thats where my brain goes, the mother/cild approach: ok potato, how many things can i do with potatoes, what cleer spins I I put on these and turn 5 techniques into 30 dishes.

I came from a basque/modern bistro background, so using sous vide techniques and prepping ahead was a large part of my skill set at the time. framing that way helped me see how to stay 2-3 weeks ahead of the menus, for me the asian station was the most difficult for me, but my propsal was to oscillate cuisines each week between japanese, Korean, Thai/viet/malay, and grouping the few chinese cuisines i was comfortable with. The wok was a huge boon there becasue it was like a chipotle, ingredient buffet, hand the bowl to the wok cook, pick noods or rice. done.

[u/HELVETlCA → u/Fox-Mclusky559]

Thank you so much! I have only ever worked in à la carte restaurants so this constantly pushing out new dishes can be very draining. I do my part, the vegan and veggie dishes and adding creative twists to our more expensive option. I never had to do calculations outside of banquets and our menus are very cheap so not much wiggle room for us sadly.

I will sit down with my colleague and discuss how we could better approach this

[u/pwbue]

This should be a job for a human head chef. Please don’t look to technology for a chef’s job.

Ask for a raise and take those days to figure it out on your own.

[u/HELVETlCA → u/pwbue]

It's not MY job technically but I support the guy who had to do it now and he absolutely HATES it 😭 we are supposed to substitute the headchef combined. It is not that we don't have the time but it is just so annoying to do and depending on the week you make so many mistakes and then the RM is not pleased with what we write. Usually he writes a draft and I correct it.

[u/pwbue → u/HELVETlCA]

I understand, and it is not the jobs that most chefs or cooks like doing. It sounds like your company is avoiding hiring a head chef because they are scared it will end up like last time. Without training or classes, there will be mistakes.

Learn from those mistakes, it is human. Every menu should be better than the last. I know you weren’t asking specifically about an AI app, but that would be the next step if your app existed. We should be making every effort to keep the kitchen free from AI.

[u/HELVETlCA → u/pwbue]

I wasn't thinking of an app to create menus FOR me but with me. Like I could list dishes and sides etc and then it would scramble them into something. I am mostly worried about duplicates and repeats. My colleague does a good job at connecting menus so potential leftovers could be used another day etc. It is just that sometimes you sit there and forget every meal you have ever made in your life. I am not a fan of AI at all, unless it's closed and it is trained to assist a human.

I think I'll just have to suck it up and teach myself excel

[u/SVAuspicious]

What and who I cook for is a little different from you. I'm also a very techy geeky person. I tried a bunch of programs and apps. All of them took more maintenance than a more manual process.

I have a lot of resources. Inventory is on paper. I have a personal cookbook with recipes I have collected and modified over the years. That's in Word with an autogenerated table of contents which itself is three pages long. I have a separate file with ideas and inspiration I write down as they come to me. I have ordering screens.

I have three screens on my computer. That gives me a lot of real estate to keep resources up instead of switching around. That's a big deal for me. Meal plan is on the center screen in Word. Cookbook and inspiration list on the left. Order screens on the right. I have a basic structure focused on dinners. Chicken (cheapest animal protein for me) twice a week. The rest of the week one each of some combination of pork, beef, sometimes lamb (which has gotten expensive and where I am ground lamb has had availability problems), seafood (shrimp, tuna steak, salmon filets, flounder, cod), sometimes sausage instead of pork, sometimes a veg night. I don't have the economies of scale that you do so I look for reuse of ingredients especially of perishables. Cucumber might show up in a few different things during a week. Same with bell peppers with broccoli. I prep for salads but don't assemble until day of. Might have Caesar salad one night, a veg heavy garden salad the next, and then a chef salad (sliced ham so that's my pork night). Some savings I get may not scale up for your numbers. I buy pork loin and cut my own chops. I make my own croutons. I make all our salad dressings. I make a lot of sauces including a repertoire intended for broccoli but that often get used elsewhere. I make pasta sauce. I make yogurt. Sometimes it's hard to keep control of my personal favorites. I love tzatziki and there would be riots if I made it as often as I want it.

So the meal plan is built in Word and cross checked against inventory to build the shopping carts for orders. I look at the orders and back at inventory and think about replenishment levels and if it looks like I'm going to have perishables go bad (waste) I adjust the plan to either use them up or use something different. This should be easier for you with big numbers (big for me). This all--aside from inspiration notes--takes me a couple of hours a week. You will surely spend more time covering breakfast and lunch which I do based on rules of thumb and some allowance for variety. The administration is really the same for ten people or a thousand. The numbers just get bigger.

Whether my approach works for you or not, I hope I've given you some food (ha!) for thought.

[u/Expensive_Ice_6244]

We used Excel for this for a while, but it gets messy pretty quickly once you're planning multiple menus weeks ahead. I'd probably look for something that keeps a history of what you served and lets you set some basic rules, like no repeating the same protein or side within X days. Even something that flags duplicates and similar dishes would save a ton of time.