Hotel F&B Panel Focuses on Margins, Staffing and Food Costs

By Elena Vasquez

Hotel food and beverage operators will examine menu profitability, staffing, food costs and operational efficiency on Tuesday, Nov. 17, 2026, at Pullman East Melbourne, during Maximum Occupancy Australia 2026.

The conference will bring together accommodation owners, executives and operators for practical conversations about running more profitable businesses. Its food-and-beverage session asks whether hotel dining can generate sound economics without weakening the guest experience.

Pawan Dutta, executive chef at Melbourne’s The Royce and winner of Chef of the Year – Accommodation at the 2025 Australian Hotels Association National Awards for Excellence, will join the speaker line-up.

Alison Hulm, managing director of JACK Hospitality, will facilitate the session, titled “Can F&B Actually Make Money?” The title states the operating test: hotel kitchens must deliver memorable dining while making the numbers work.

What does this panel change for hotel operators?

For owners and operators, the session creates a framework for judging food and beverage as a commercial operation rather than treating dining as a standalone amenity. It links culinary quality with commercial performance and asks where operators lose margin.

The discussion will cover five operating areas:

• Menu profitability
• Staffing
• Food costs
• Operational efficiency
• Attracting diners beyond the hotel’s overnight guests

That makes the session a menu-engineering and cost-control discussion, not a debate about taste alone. The panel will consider which operational changes can improve performance without compromising the guest experience.

Attracting diners beyond overnight stays gives hotel food service a potential customer base beyond room occupants. The announcement specifies no service format, menu concept or pricing plan, so it provides no basis for forecasting covers or revenue.

The announcement provides no check average, menu food-cost percentage, wage figure, labor ratio or margin target. It names no other participating hotel and does not identify the fellow panelists. The session therefore defines the questions operators will face, not the savings they will achieve.

A chef’s view of hotel economics

Dutta leads the culinary offering at one of Melbourne’s luxury boutique hotels. The announcement positions his contribution as a connection between the realities of running a hotel kitchen and the expectations of owners, operators and guests.

For an operator, that perspective brings the trade-off into practical terms: changes that improve menu profitability or control food and staffing costs also have to preserve the experience. The panel will examine both sides of that equation, with culinary quality and commercial performance treated as simultaneous requirements.

An operator’s opening record

Hulm has overseen more than 60 restaurant and bar openings, the largest operating credential disclosed in the announcement. Her experience spans hotel and restaurant operations, concept development and business improvement.

As facilitator, she brings that operating record to the discussion alongside Dutta’s perspective from inside a hotel kitchen. The session description says the panel will examine “where operators lose margin” and the changes that can improve performance without compromising the guest experience.

The panel within the wider hotel business

The panel forms part of a broader Maximum Occupancy program. Its scope puts the F&B discussion alongside the commercial and operational issues facing accommodation businesses.

The wider program covers:

• Hotel ownership and leadership
• Revenue, marketing and distribution
• Technology
• The 2027 accommodation outlook

Together, those subjects frame the F&B panel as one operating question within a wider hotel business: how dining choices, kitchen economics and service standards contribute to the property’s financial performance.

The conference therefore gives hotel owners and executives a forum to test practical changes rather than a promise of immediate revenue growth. No financial model, case-study result or operator target accompanies the announcement.

For operators, the value of the Nov. 17 panel will come from the changes it identifies in menu choices, staffing, food-cost control and demand beyond overnight stays, without sacrificing the hotel experience; until speakers disclose benchmarks or case results, any margin gain remains a possibility rather than a promised number.