With food costs rising and customers reeling from the economic downturn, it’s more important than ever to add value to and increase the profitability of your menu. A great way to do this is by using basic ingredients to meet several needs. This helps reduce inventory items, lowers food costs, and provides multiple uses for products. Here are a few ideas that show how you can better utilize what you have in your kitchens to build more value into what you are serving.

To start to build value, examine what you have in your refrigerator or freezer. You can take ordinary items and create many signature products. One example: specialty corn muffins. You can make basic corn muffins for breakfast. Then, for lunch, you can start with the same batter, then add jalapeño peppers, green peppers, onions, and seasoning, and drop fry the mix to create a fritter and serve with a salad, or as appetizer with soup for lunch. For dinner, you could butterfly a six-ounce serving of chicken breast and add ham, cooked Italian sausage and Swiss cheese, and mold these items with some steamed corn batter into the chicken breast. This item is then roasted and served with rice or mixed vegetables.

Another example: you can use a cinnamon roll to make offerings at different parts of the day by changing the roll to reach higher profitability in creating a specialty item. You could flatten the cinnamon roll dough, add fresh sliced apples, and rim the dough with rolled oats before baking, to create a nice pastry. Or, create a signature waffle with cinnamon roll dough and serve it with ice cream and a topping. For the ultimate dessert experience, you can add Jamaican rum syrup and fresh-made custard to the cinnamon rolls part way through baking and then continue baking to make a Jamaican cinnamon roll bread pudding. This can be served warm from the oven with a rum sauce.

The options are really endless. Basically, with any frozen or rolled dough, you can create so many different items besides the obvious dinner rolls. You can make breakfast sandwiches by placing an individual small roll on the bottom, picking your favorite ham and cheese or spinach and cheese combination, putting it all in a muffing cup and then topping it with another dinner roll. So using a dinner roll that costs 12 cents to make, you now can create any lunch or breakfast sandwich and make three or four times more than your cost when you sell it.

Another option is to take an average two-ounce dough and drop in any fruit you have on hand—mango, pineapple, any fruit filling. You place it in the middle of the dough, round it, seal it and then drop fry it. You can call it an empanada, which is extremely trendy right now in the industry.

Most resorts don’t realize they have the ingredients in their freezer to make many inexpensive but tasty (and profitable) food items. You just need to take that one item and create multiple variations. Before long, you’ll have some great signature items for your restaurant. Be aware of how you can add value to your menu by choosing one product to create signature items and a higher profit while lowering inventory in the refrigerator or freezer. A little imagination and creativity can go a long way.


This article is adapted from a presentation sponsored by the Boston Culinary Group at the Northeast Winter Sports Summit at Bretton Woods last fall.