How Food Inflation Is Affecting Ontario Restaurants — and What Smart Operators Are Doing

The food cost pressure facing Ontario restaurant operators over the last several years has been unlike anything most operators have seen in their careers. Input costs — labour, energy, packaging — have all risen. But protein costs, and chicken specifically, have been among the most volatile line items on a food service P&L.

The operators managing through this most effectively have made specific strategic decisions about how they source protein. Here’s what we’re seeing.

Moving Closer to the Source

Buying chicken through a distributor adds cost at every step between the processor and your kitchen. The operators managing food cost most effectively in this environment are reducing those steps — buying direct from processors where volume allows, developing relationships with manufacturers rather than middlemen.

D&D Poultry is a manufacturer. We process and ship direct to food service clients across Ontario. The distributor markup doesn’t exist in our pricing. For operators at sufficient volume, that difference is meaningful on a per-kilogram basis across every product category.

Reconsidering Product Format

Fully cooked, pre-portioned chicken products cost more per kilogram on the invoice than raw chicken. But when you factor in the labour cost of in-house fabrication and cooking, the kitchen space required, and the yield loss from in-house processing, the economics often invert. Smart operators are running this calculation for their highest-volume chicken applications and finding that pre-portioned, IQF formats deliver better total cost.

Locking In Supplier Relationships

The operators with the most cost stability are those who have developed genuine supplier relationships — multi-month arrangements with agreed pricing windows rather than spot-buying every week. A trusted supplier like D&D Poultry, in business for over thirty years with three generations of a family whose reputation depends on the relationship, is a different kind of partner than a distributor managing hundreds of accounts.

For large restaurant chains and multi-location operators, D&D Poultry is represented by McCormack Bourrie Sales & Marketing — a Concord, Ontario food broker since 1992 — who specialize in exactly these longer-term supply relationships. Contact Darko Janovski at darko@ddpoultry.com or 416-609-9300 to start the conversation.

Talk to D&D Poultry about cost-effective Ontario chicken supply — darko@ddpoultry.com

Call 416-609-9300

www.ddpoultry.ca/foodservice/