How to Fit Menu Planning into Your Procurement Process

If you clicked on this article with a lot of skepticism, I don’t blame you. 

Creating menu plans months before you need them is hard. 

It’s hard to justify spending time on something you don’t need right now. 

It’s hard to guess what students will want in 6+ months. 

It’s hard to predict what lessons you’ll learn about items that can’t be menued together because of student acceptability or because the items take up too much room in the oven. 

But bear with me. I use a simplified version of menu planning as part of my procurement process that helps solve some of these concerns. 

We’ll get to that, but first, it’s important to understand how beneficial menu planning in procurement can be and how it can impact your operation. 

Importance of Menu Planning in Procurement

There’s a reason state agencies (and USDA and ICN…) harp on us to plan our menus before we do our procurement. 

Put simply, if you haven’t done a menu plan first, you don’t know what you need to buy. 

But why does it matter? Can’t you just make a list of things you might buy? 

Nope. Not if you want good pricing.

How Menu Planning Affects Procurement

In order to properly do a procurement, you are aiming to choose a vendor that will cost you the least amount of money. 

It’s rare that a vendor has the lowest price on every item you’re looking for. Vendor A will have better pricing on certain items, while Vendor B will have better pricing on other items. What determines which vendor wins the bid is how much of each item you’re planning on buying, which then determines your bottom-line cost. 

When you just make a list of the items you might buy, you aren’t able to accurately predict which vendor is going to provide you the best pricing because the bottom-line cost is going to vary from vendor to vendor based solely on how much of each item you’re buying. 

Example of How Menu Planning Affects Procurement

Let’s look at an example with just two items: burgers and chicken patties.

Imagine you’ve always served burgers and chicken patties each once per cycle. Chicken patties are more popular, so you use more of those whenever they’re menued. You receive the following two bids back: 

In this case, you would award the bid to Vendor A because the total price is lower with them. You pay a little more for the chicken patties with Vendor A, but the cost savings of the burger amount to greater bottom-line savings for you. 

Now imagine after you do the bid, you get around to planning your menu and decide to cut burgers from the menu and do chicken patties twice instead. 

You know where I’m going with this. 

If you’d done your menu before going out to bid, you wouldn’t have included burgers on the bid. In that case, you would have awarded the bid to Vendor B, since their chicken patties are cheaper. 

Those changes we make to our menu can impact the outcome of our bid award, which ultimately impacts our bottom line.  

This emphasizes how important it is to incorporate menu planning in procurement processes.

It’s easier to understand when we just look at two items, but it gets much harder to wrap your mind around when you have a list of 300+ items on a bid.  

I wouldn’t advise that you create a menu plan and stubbornly stick to it, no matter what. Sometimes it’s in your district’s best interest to pivot and update your menu. COVID also taught us that you don’t always know which items will be discontinued or in short supply. 

It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t at least try to menu plan before you do your procurement. The more you plan, the more accurate your forecast will be. 

Gold Standard in Menu Planning

The gold standard is to plan out your entire menu cycle before you do your procurement.

I’ve always found this difficult for reasons I alluded to earlier:

1) we have so much going on that it feels low priority to plan out a menu that won’t be needed for 6+ months, and

2) we feel like if we do it too early, there is a high probability the menu will change over the course of the next 6+ months because of changing preferences or lessons learned. 

If you’re not struggling with it and can write your menus before going out to bid, go for it! If not, let me explain the process I like to use instead. I call it the simplified menu plan. 

How to Complete a Simplified Menu Plan Before Procurement 

To complete the simplified menu plan, my goal is to create a list of entrees and vegetables I plan to menu the upcoming school year, but I’m not making an exact cycle where I figure out which entrees and vegetables will be menued on which days. 

Simplified Planning for Entrees

To complete this, first figure out how many days will be in your menu cycle. 

• We do a four-week cycle at lunch, so that’s 20 days for my district. 

Next, multiply by how many entrees you have that change each day. Don’t include any entrees you offer every day in this estimate. 

• We do two lunch entrees that change daily, so that’s 40 entrees that are served in a cycle. 

If you do any “manager’s choice” options, where managers work off inventory or offer school favorites, subtract those. 

• My district normally does 2 per cycle, so we can subtract 2. We’re now at 38 entrees we need. 

Now, number a piece of paper from 1 to however many entrees you calculated you need. 

• For me, that’s 1 to 38. 

Start filling in the entrees you want to serve next year. 

• We start with the ones we already have and decide whether we want to keep or cut each one. 
• Next, we think through possible new entrees we want to include, until we get to the 38 we think we want. 

• We also have a list of 5-10 alternates that we list that we can rotate onto the cycle during the second semester or use if one of our 38 is shorted. 

Simplified Planning for Vegetables

Then, come up with a list of vegetables you want to serve. 

• Like entrees, we come up with a list of vegetables we currently serve and decide if we want to keep or cut each one. 
• We also think through possible new vegetables we might want to serve 

For vegetables, we don’t list a specific number since we repeat veggies throughout the cycle. 

Simplified Planning for Breakfast

Next, repeat the process for breakfast. 

• We do a 2-week cycle, so that’s 10 days. 
• We do 1 entrée that changes each day, so that’s 10 breakfast entrees we need. 
• In our district, we don’t do manager’s choice at breakfast, so we still need 10 breakfast entrees.  

Planning for Daily Options

I told you earlier not to include any of your daily offerings in your count. Once you’ve sorted out all the items that rotate, you can make a list of your daily offerings at breakfast and lunch and decide if you are going to make changes to these offerings. 

Forecasting for Procurement

At the end of the simplified menu planning process, you will have a list of the items you will serve, but not necessarily the exact day in the cycle every item is menued. 

This allows you to know 1) which items you can delete from bid that you don’t plan on using, 2) which items you need to add, and 3) which items you may need to increase or decrease estimated usage when forecasting estimated usage. 

Finalizing Menu Cycle

When it gets closer time to finalizing our actual menu cycle, we bust out our simplified menu plan and just start plugging in items onto our menu cycle. There may have been some minor changes to the list since we first developed it, but we do try to keep to it as much as possible.  

The downside of doing this, rather than actually planning out the full cycle, is that usage can vary based on what it’s menued up against. For example, spaghetti usually does pretty well for us, but if it were menued up against pizza, our usage would decrease significantly. That’s really hard to estimate anyway, so I don’t worry much about it. 

Summary

Again, if you can plan your entire menu cycle before your bid, then all the power to you. You’re a rockstar! 

If you can’t, just know you are not alone, and the simplified menu plan is still better than not doing anything at all. This will help you start incorporating menu planning in procurement processes!