‘Traditional’ Sunday Lunch
The easiest food USP for the business was the Sunday Lunch offering. Prior to my arrival at the pub the chef (microwave technician) had very rarely sold the Sunday Lunch offering from the managed house menu (in fact the most sold in one service was 4!). This was hardly surprising as the offering (half roast chicken or beef) was pre-portioned, pre-cooked in its own gravy and accompanied by bought in roasties and frozen veg!
My paternal grandmother (a wise old bird with 50 years commercial catering under her belt before she died) gave me a sound piece of advice: “… give them a big, well-cooked roast on a Sunday and they’ll be in during the rest of the week as well.”
To the horror of the microwave technician that first Sunday we cooked from scratch, offered four meats and a nutroast, four fresh vegetables, roast and mashed potatoes and parsnips and rich sherry gravy. The first week we sold 11, the second 23, and so on until within 13 weeks we were averaging 50. Over the next three years by following this formula we built our Sunday trade from an average of £900 to over £3,000.
The USP for our Sunday Lunch was that it was all prepped and cooked in-house and that it was simply huge. Business-wise it was also one of the higher GP items we sold (simply through economies of scale on the numbers sold every week and that Monday’s special always featured a smaller roast, thus reducing waste to virtually zero).
It was so successful that we took bookings (unheard of in the pub previously), had regular repeat custom and were able to wean our local trade off football, male dominated drinking sessions on to family days (it enabled to ditch the £18,000 p.a. cost of Sky within 2 years and not look back!) Instead of the pub being busy for a couple of hours for the footie we remained consistently busy with a great buzz to the place from 12 noon to early evening. With a core clientele staying on from lunch to read the papers and then enjoy our Sunday evening program of free entertainment.
Remember ” A roast isn’t just for Sunday” – for many outlets offering a selection of good quality roast dinners at other times of the week is a business winner, for instance if your pub is a weekday venue and Sunday is a quiet food day then make roasts available on other days. (British Roast Dinner Week promotes roasts dinners in the autumn … 2013’s event is September 30th – October 6th)
Top Tip – make your own Yorkshire Puddings click here for a video demonstration
Nose To Tail Dining
A great USP for pub food is the “head to tail”concept, whereby all the parts of an animal carcass is used. For what must be one of the most comprehensive books on the subject check out Richard H Turners’s “Hog” (Octopus Books) , which contains all you need to know about breeds and cuts, different cooking methods and dishes, and is beautifully designed to boot. It feels like the work of someone who is totally in love with pork and has put everything into making sure you’ll love it too. There are also some contributions from the likes of Fergus Henderson, Neil Rankin and Valentine Warner, and also basic recipes for master pork stock (why use chicken stock in a pork dish after all?), BBQ sauce, bacon, ham and sausages. Or, you could learn to do this all yourself as Anna Turns from the Food Assembly discovered in this blog piece.
Market Research News
Despite all the recent “horsegate” scandals steak sales are worth £580m to the UK’s managed pubs. Research from insights firm CGA Strategy (April 2013) shows that 90% of managed pubs currently offer steak offer on their menu. Destination venues are the heartland for steak sales – in these outlets £1 in every £5 spent on food going towards a steak course compared to £1 in £13 for the average food pub. Rump is the biggest seller and penetration for the better cuts of beef is actually still relatively low given the size of this category. Fillet, for example is only on 50% of menus and rib-eye is on just 33% of menus. CGA said the revenue opportunity for trading customers up the steak quality ladder is significant. The average sirloin sells for £2.85 more than rump, with rib eye holding a £5.82 price premium to the entry level rump.
CGA’s Scott Elliott said: “The fact that 20% of food sales can be driven by just one element of the menu and that only rump and sirloin are typically offered would indicate a clear opportunity for growth. Any way of differentiating your offer from the competition is a good thing in this competitive market and given the obvious love for the category, being known for ‘great steaks’ can only be good for business.”