South Wales Menu Development Consultancy

Build a Menu That Works as Hard as You Do

A menu is far more than a list of dishes. It is your most powerful commercial tool — and one of the most commonly underused ones in the hospitality industry. A well-constructed menu drives gross profit, reduces waste, simplifies kitchen operations, and gives your guests a clear, compelling reason to order.

On The Pass Consultancy provides menu development and profitability consultancy to restaurants, cafés, hotels, and food service businesses ...across South Wales — including Cardiff, Newport, Swansea, and the surrounding region, as well as Bristol and Gloucester. With over 30 years of culinary and commercial experience, we help catering businesses build menus that are both creatively strong and financially sound.

Most hospitality menus are built around what the chef wants to cook — and there is nothing wrong with that as a starting point. But without a commercial framework behind the creative decisions, menus frequently suffer from the same set of problems.

Dishes that are popular but barely profitable. Ingredients that drive up food cost without adding perceived value. Menu sections that confuse rather than guide the guest. Portion sizes that feel generous but quietly erode margin. Seasonal changes that are made on instinct rather than on data.

These are problems that are easy to fix once you know they are there. The difficulty is that from inside the business, they are very hard to see. We have spent 30 years looking at menus from the outside — and we know exactly what to look for.

MENU PROFITABILITY ANALYSIS

We review your current menu in detail — calculating the gross profit margin on each dish, identifying your highest and lowest performers, and mapping the relationship between popularity and profitability. This gives you a clear picture of exactly where your menu is and is not working commercially.

MENU ENGINEERING

Using the data from our profitability analysis, we apply menu engineering principles to restructure your menu — positioning high-margin dishes where they will be noticed, reviewing pricing strategy, and identifying where small adjustments can make a significant difference to your overall GP.

DISH DEVELOPMENT AND RECIPE COSTING

Where your menu needs new dishes — whether to replace underperformers, respond to seasonal change, or evolve your concept — we work with you and your kitchen team to develop recipes that are both commercially costed and creatively compelling.

CONCEPT DEVELOPMENT

If you are opening a new site, rebranding an existing one, or entering a new market segment, we can develop your menu concept from scratch — building a menu structure, style, and pricing architecture that fits your target customer and your commercial model.

SUPPLIER AND INGREDIENT REVIEW

Food cost is as much about purchasing as it is about recipes. We review your supplier relationships and ingredient specifications — identifying where you can achieve better value without compromising on quality or consistency.

GROSS PROFIT IMPROVEMENT

For businesses with a specific GP target, we work through a structured programme of menu review, portion analysis, recipe costing, and pricing strategy — with the goal of measurably improving your gross profit percentage within a defined timeframe.

Our menu development service is relevant to any hospitality or food service business where food is a significant part of the commercial operation — including:

Independent restaurants and bistros across Cardiff, Bristol, and Gloucester

Hotel food and beverage departments

Gastro pubs and food-led bars

Cafés and coffee shops with a substantive food offering

Contract catering operations — workplace, education, and healthcare

Event caterers and outside catering businesses

We are, at our core, people who love food. The creative side of menu development — building dishes that excite guests, that reflect a concept, that work beautifully on a plate — is something we care about deeply.

But we also understand that a restaurant is a business. A dish that wins awards but runs at 45% food cost is a problem. We hold both sides of that tension simultaneously, and the menus we develop reflect both — commercially sound and genuinely exciting for your guests.

If you would like to discuss your menu and understand where the commercial opportunities lie, get in touch for a free initial consultation.