Food costs are up 35% from pre-pandemic levels. Rising fuel prices ripple across the entire supply chain and menu prices have risen 3.6% over the last year just to keep pace. If you’re running a restaurant right now, most of the pressure on your margins is coming from costs you can’t directly control — and that’s not changing anytime soon.

But labor is different. Labor is the one major cost center where operators still have real decisions to make every single week. And it’s worth treating it that way.

A few places to start:

Get serious about menu engineering. When ingredient costs jump, not every menu item absorbs the hit equally. Do a quarterly audit of your top sellers by margin, not just by popularity. Items that are high-volume but low-margin might be worth repricing, reformulating, or quietly retiring. Freeing up kitchen complexity also frees up labor.

Match staffing to actual sales patterns, not habit. Most operators schedule based on how they’ve always done it. For example scheduling the same coverage every Friday, same crew every Sunday brunch. Pull your POS data and look at hourly sales by day. You’ll almost always find shifts that are consistently overstaffed and others that are consistently stretched thin. Adjusting coverage to actual demand, rather than intuition, is one of the fastest ways to reduce unnecessary labor cost without cutting service quality.

Reduce food waste as a margin lever. The National Restaurant Association estimates food waste accounts for a significant portion of restaurant losses and prep staffing is directly connected to it. Tightening your prep schedules to match projected covers, rather than worst-case estimates, can reduce both ingredient waste and the labor hours spent on prep that wasn’t needed.

See labor cost before the week happens, not after. One underused tool: scheduling software that shows projected labor cost as a percentage of forecasted sales while you’re building the schedule – not just after payroll closes. Catching a 38% labor week before it happens gives you a chance to adjust. Catching it on the P&L report doesn’t. Tools like SchedulesMadeSimple.com are built around this kind of real-time visibility, which matters most when margins are this tight.

You can’t fix what produce costs this week. You can fix how many people you have on the floor and whether you knew what that would cost before they clocked in.