Most restaurants try to solve current challenges by addressing them in isolation, and with little success. But what if there is a more creative approach, that may seem unconventional, but can also lead to better outcomes with less effort?
Restaurants are going through it in 2026. Prime costs keep rising, staff turnover is high, and inflation has decreased demand. On top of all of the difficulties, competition is intense, and trust between neighboring restaurants that once made a local food scene feel like a community is hard to find.
The first step in this new approach to problem-solving for restaurants is recognizing that these problems are interconnected and form a feedback loop. Higher tariffs and ingredient costs squeeze already tight margins. Tight margins means there isn’t enough money to pay employees or hire new staff, so that leads to understaffing. Understaffing leads to employee burnout, and burnout leads to staff turnover. Staff turnover leads to training of new staff, which includes more mistakes, costs in staff time, over-prepping, and higher waste. Higher waste is money thrown away, ultimately looping back to tighten margins even further.
Food waste, which is harmful to the restaurant, the planet and to people is both a symptom and cause. In other words, the initial problem seems to be a food cost problem, but it’s actually a people, or operating system, problem. A tired, understaffed, and constantly changing team wastes more money.
Because the problems are connected, fixing one in isolation often moves the pressure somewhere else. Cutting labor to save money can raise waste and turnover. Chasing cheaper suppliers can hurt quality and reliability.
The restaurants that are able to overcome these obstacles tend to stop treating costs, staffing, and waste as separate budgets. They start looking at how each one affects the others. We call this a systems lens approach.
A systems-lens approach could vary from restaurant to restaurant, but one key piece is understanding the effects of current operating processes. Here are a few examples:
Costs. Restaurants can’t control tariffs, but they can control what waste adds to food costs. Many restaurants are surprised by how much money and staff energy sits in food that never reaches the plate, and in plate waste at the end of the night. Champions 12.3, a cross-sector coalition dedicated to reducing food waste, found that among 1,200 food service sites across 700 companies that were reducing food waste, nearly every one of them experienced a positive return on investment for their efforts. Half of them experienced a return of over 14 times what they had invested.
Staffing. Instead of asking staff to do more with fewer hands, determine where time is already being lost.
Suppliers. Relying on large distributors leaves the restaurant exposed to price changes, and if something goes wrong with the distributor or the producers behind it, the restaurant feels it. Small local growers are less predictable, but they often bring better quality and a connection to the local community that can draw customers in. The restaurants that successfully source from a variety of local suppliers build their menus and their relationships so that one disruption doesn’t bring the whole kitchen down.
In most restaurants, there are a couple of places where the pressure builds up. Relieving it in those areas ends up helping other areas as well. The tricky part is that the loop of challenges is unique in every restaurant. The pressure points in a large chain restaurant may look very different from a small, neighborhood cafe. Understanding where the loop builds in a specific restaurant is the first step. This is the work Emergent Roots does with owners who are ready to look at the whole picture.
If any of this sounds familiar, let’s talk.