Enhance Your Menu with Seasonal Menu Items

• Buying food that is in season is often cheaper.² Farms are more likely to have seasonal items in abundance, incentivizing them to cut you a deal to move their produce before it spoils. Also, if you buy food items that are seasonal to your area specifically, you can save on shipping costs.


• Fresh, seasonal food has better flavor.³ Food that is purchased in season is more likely to have come straight from the source, while out-of-season produce may have spent weeks or months in dry storage or a freezer. Additionally, produce that is not meant to be used right away is often picked before its peak of ripeness, which can affect not only the item's flavor but also its nutritional value.


• Seasonal menu items are more environmentally friendly. Items that are grown in-season are usually grown outside without the assistance of an energy-intensive greenhouses. Buying local seasonal food also has an impact, as shorter trips produce less greenhouse gas, which in turn decreases the carbon footprint of each dish you create.

Seasonal Planning Tips

Consider starting with a small seasonal menu in addition to your usual staples, then expand it later if the trial goes well, but be sure to keep your menu updated. Customers don't appreciate being told that you ran out of that locally grown corn you still have listed from last week, and making claims about your sourcing that you can't back up could land your restaurant in hot water with customers or suppliers.

Seasonal menus require a fine balance of planning and flexibility. You'll need to plan ahead by designing recipes featuring the seasonal ingredients you choose, but your ingredients being at the whims of the weather means you also need to be prepared to adjust your menu at the last minute to make do without that shipment of squash or tomatoes you had your eye on.

On the flip side, if your supplier comes into an abundance of zucchini at the end of August, it may be offered to you at a special price for a bulk purchase. That could leave you with baskets full of an unplanned ingredient you need to create a recipe for.

You'll also need to decide whether to stick with local providers or to widen your options a bit by expanding your buying radius. Buying locally gives you another advantage you can capitalize on in advertising, but expanding your search allows you more flexibility in planning your menu with a wider range of ingredients.

If you decide to stay local, you can discuss your seasonal options with local produce suppliers, or you can do some research online on what items are in-season in your area. If you decide to have seasonal items shipped in from outside your immediate vicinity, you have more ingredients to choose from, but you may need to be careful about where you buy from to ensure you're getting fresh, never-frozen produce.

While each year's weather can cause this to vary, we've put together an infographic of which fruits and vegetables are usually available each month of the year in the U.S. to give you a starting point as you plan your menu.