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Would You Miss These Ingredients? Some Restaurant Owners Think Not And Save Serious Money

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There's a great story that has become part of business lore. In 1987, Robert L. Crandall, the head of American Airlines at the time, removed one olive from every dinner salad served to passengers. He figured nobody would notice or care, and the airline would save some money. Different sources say different things. Some, like Bloomberg and The New York Times, say the airline saved $40,000 a year. An ABC story claims it was $100,000. The book, Corporate Creativity, by Alan G. Robinson and Sam Stern state that it was half a million.

Well, no matter. The point is – cut a little here and there off the menu in an airline, restaurant or wherever you serve food, and you can save a decent amount. So with that spirit in mind, I asked some food business owners what ingredients they've found to be not all that important and what they've saved by eliminating it. If you're a restaurant owner, or any sort of business owner, maybe what these people did will give you some ideas of your own.

Margarine. Barry Nelson, the vice president of operations at Pancheros Mexcian Grill, a Midwest-based burrito franchise with over 65 locations, says that the restaurant attempted to cut the margarine from their rice to make it vegan. So they weren't going for any cost savings, but they replaced it with vegetable oil, and it turns out that it was cheaper.

In fact, Nelson says for every bag of rice the restaurant uses, by switching from margarine to vegetable oil, they're saving 39 cents. That translates into approximately $1,000 per year, per restaurant.

Parsley. Ah, good ol' parsley, that vegetable nobody eats. According to the website, Restaurant-ing through History, a fun and fascinating blog, parsley has been served in restaurants at least as early as 1886. By the early 20th century, according to the blog, almost the entire U.S. parsley crop wound up in restaurants and in butcher shops.

Small wonder that some restaurant owners would decide that they can live without it. Marc Renson, owner of the restaurant and coffeehouse, Ambition Coffee & Eatery in Schenectady, New York used to garnish dishes with parsley.

Instead, Renson began chopping up spinach, "which we buy, anyway," and using that as garnish instead.

"The same color. Same appeal. Same sprinkle. And nobody has ever said a thing," Renson says.

He says that he is now saving over $300 a year.

Whole milk. Renson again. He says that most of his clientele asks for skim milk, and so he stopped buying whole milk and now makes all of the cappuccinos and lattes with skim milk, which he says is less expensive.

"Wham, pow, shazam, we saved another $400 [a year]," Renson says. "Plus, we freed up storage space in coolers."

Celery. Parsley may be the least appreciated vegetable, but celery has to be a close second. For instance, a couple years ago, the TV show Portlandia had a reportedly hilarious episode (I haven't seen it) about a celery salesman who was trying to make the vegetable trendy.

Anyway, for Steve Lindner, CEO of ZoneManhattan.com, a fresh meal delivery service, he has found that he can eliminate celery from his menu, when he needs to, without any problems, and save a considerable amount of money.

Typically, he says, "we use about six cases of celery a week. Celery is a staple – it's used in everything from stocks to chicken or lobster salad to the traditional garnish on buffalo chicken wings.  So when the cost doubles you feel it. When it triples you start getting nervous and, when it goes up five times you figure out how to work without it. For the last two weeks the price of celery was above $50 and peaked at $64, per case."

That said, Lindner says you can't just get rid of celery, if there's a reason for it being in a meal, so lately he's substituting it with fennel, another vegetable that could probably also use a PR campaign to give it more buzz.

Lindner says that fennel is usually more expensive than celery, about double the price, but right now, at $25 a case, it's a bargain. He figures from switching from celery to fennel, he is currently saving $150 a week.

Sugar and oil. Three years ago, Glenn Cybulski started his business Persona Wood Fired Pizzeria, which now has three locations (two in California and one in South Carolina), and he decided to eliminate sugar and oil in their dough. He says that with the high heat oven, he and co-founder Joseph Baumel decided they didn't need sugar and oil.

Granted, that's a shrewd marketing move – they can brag about their pizza being healthier – but Cybulski, the CEO, says that judging from the current costs, each restaurant is saving every year $3,822 on 1,092 pounds of olive oil and $6,368.64 on 642 pounds of sugar.

Mozzarella. I come from a long line of Italian-Americans and am not suggesting anyone should give up their mozzarella cheese, but Kevin Chun, executive chef at Louie and Chan, a trendy but casual Italian restaurant in New York City, says that he eliminated the imported buffalo mozzarella for their pizza and started making their own mozzarella cheese in the restaurant.

"The customer perception was increasingly positive, and it helped support a small dairy farm in Vermont," Chun says.

It only saves about a $1 a pound, according to Chun, but that translates into $40 to $50 a week, which means the restaurant is likely saving between about $2,000 and $2,600 a year, offset, of course, by the time it takes to make your own cheese. Still, for some restaurants, making something instead of importing it might end up being a cost-saver.