Running a professional kitchen in the UK has never been more expensive. Food costs are up, energy bills are unpredictable, and kitchen staff — especially experienced ones — are harder to find and more expensive to keep than at any point in the last decade.
The pressure to cut costs is real. But too many operators make the mistake of cutting in the wrong places — reducing portion sizes, switching to lower-grade ingredients, or paring back the menu. These are visible cuts that customers notice.
There's a less visible lever that many HORECA operators are now pulling: prep time.
The hidden cost of made-from-scratch bases
Consider a Makhani gravy. Made properly — from whole spices, slow-roasted tomatoes, cream and aromatics — it takes 3 to 4 hours of active cooking. At the current London living wage of £13.85/hour, that's nearly £55 in labour costs before you've plated a single dish.
Multiply that across a menu with four or five curry bases, and you're looking at a significant daily labour overhead that doesn't appear anywhere in your food cost percentage.
The solution isn't a compromise
Using a pre-prepared gravy base doesn't mean using an inferior product. The key distinction is between commercial curry sauce (the cheap, generic stuff that comes in 5-litre tins and tastes like it) and chef-developed gravy bases that are genuinely produced to restaurant quality.
The Fresh Curry's bases are developed by professional chefs and produced in a SALSA-certified facility. The Makhani Gravy, for example, uses the same slow-roast process as you'd use in-house — it just happens at a production scale that makes the economics work.
Your kitchen team still adds the protein, adjusts seasoning, and finishes the dish. The result is consistent, quality food — just without the 3am prep shift.
What the numbers look like
For a restaurant doing 80 covers a night with three curry bases on the menu:
- In-house prep: ~6 hours of kitchen labour daily = ~£83/day = ~£2,500/month
- With TFC bases: 30 minutes of heating and finishing = ~£7/day = ~£210/month
- Monthly saving: approximately £2,290 in direct labour
The cost of the bases themselves is between £8 and £11 per kg depending on variety and pack size — a fraction of the saving.
The consistency argument
There's another benefit that doesn't show up in a spreadsheet: consistency.
When your curry base depends on whoever is on the pass that night, you get variation. A new hire who's not confident with spicing. An experienced chef who's off sick. A busy Friday night where the base doesn't get the attention it needs.
Pre-produced bases eliminate that variable. Your Makhani tastes the same on a Tuesday lunch as it does on a Saturday dinner. That consistency is what builds a regular customer base.
Getting started
The best way to evaluate whether this works for your kitchen is to run a trial. We offer free sample packs to HORECA operators — one kilogram of whichever bases are most relevant to your menu.