Index array formula the best solution?

Hi all,

I've been troubled with this spreadsheet for the past few weeks, and appreciate if you guys could provide some insights or tips.

I'm doing a chef's menu generator, whereby users can select from a pre-determined list of menus, as well as modify existing menus for their use. All the information on the menus are in the Database sheet, including items like description, category, costs etc.

The main sheet is the MenuSelector sheet, whereby there are some criteria that I ask of the user, before the menu is generated. Upon selecting the name of menu ($A$6), the menu items (up to 30 items) are pulled from the Database sheet. As there are many sub-categories, some of which are duplicates, I can't use a simple Vlookup and have instead used a series of array index formulas.

2 of the major problems that I faced are as below:

1. This arrangement is calculation-heavy, and it takes about 15s each time when it refreshes. I've changed the calculation to manual for the moment, though that is not user-friendly, as a lot of the dropdowns are dependent on the calculations.

2. Under the Replacement Item column, this is where I allow users to change specific menu items based on their category, and allowing them to set further criteria if they desire (Sub-Category, Special Diet). The drop-down lists are from Column BH onwards. The problem I faced is that there seem to be duplicates for some reason, even though the duplicates are not in the database.

I'm not an expert excel users and most of the formulas are put together based on google and searching through the forum. Really appreciate all the help that I can get.

thanks!