What better way to bring customers through the door of your brewery than with a menu packed with the most profitable bar foods?
Are you serving food at your brewery or taproom? If there’s one thing that goes great with a few drinks, it’s some delicious prepared-in-house bar food. Keep your customers satisfied with excellent service, tasty food, and good company. Here are the most profitable bar foods to offer that will keep customers coming back for more!
At almost every place you can drink today, you can order food. Customers want and expect to eat, and food service is an excellent way to boost your bar profit margin. But before you copy the Buffalo Wild Wings menu and cleverly rename “Desert Heat” to “Spicy Beach,” do your homework.
Are you ready to serve food at your brewery or taproom? Here are the most profitable bar foods to offer and what to consider before taking the plunge.
6 Reasons Your Brewery Needs to Serve Food
- Your customers want it. Are bars profitable without serving food anymore? It seems unlikely because so few drinking establishments today lack a menu. Bar patrons expect munchies at a minimum, and salty foods encourage them to drink more.
- Food increases how long customers stay. You certainly don’t want paying customers to leave when they get hungry. Keep them in their seats by satisfying the primal urge for crispy tater tots smothered in melty cheese.
- Food makes for bigger tabs. Obviously, food cranks up the tab total. That means bigger tips for servers, too.
- Attract new customers. Not everybody drinks. You’ll attract a more diverse clientele and maybe even earlier and mid-week crowds by serving great food.
- Serving food is healthier. Drinking can deplete electrolytes and potassium, putting customers at risk. Eating can help prevent emergency health situations. Food will also soak up some of the alcohol, so most of your patrons will be at least slightly more sober when they leave.
- Hot food and cold beer are a natural combination. Beer and wings have reached PB&J status in American culture.
How to Create Your Most Profitable Bar Food Menu
There’s a lot to consider before you decide what menu to serve. For example, should you consider serving a full menu, partnering with a restaurant, or simply offering a few snacks to increase the thirst of your patrons?
Assess Your Kitchen and Staff
What are your current capabilities? Do you have the equipment and staff to store, prepare, and serve a variety of foods? If you have limited equipment, you may want to limit your menu.
Evaluate Your Customer Likes
Before you invest in a deep fryer, make sure you know your customers. Beer drinkers may want different foods than wine drinkers or people who prefer fruity tropical drinks with little umbrellas. No bar food is profitable if you can’t sell it. Your bar’s profit depends on how well you gauge your customers’ preferences. Before you assume typical wings and sliders, make sure you fully understand your customer base.
The best way to assess customer preferences is to ask. Use social media to build your menu. Create a private group of verified customers and post polls to determine the best ideas. You can even gamify the choice by inviting patrons and employees to submit ideas for voting—if their suggestion (or recipe) makes the menu, let the person who submitted it name the item. It’s a great way to build loyalty while publicizing your intent to serve food.
Stocking what your customers want not only pleases your clientele but also cuts down on waste and spoilage, making for a higher profit margin.
Know Your Area
Take a look at other popular bars in your area. What makes them stand out? You want to understand what they do right but not do the same thing. You also want to make a note of your competitors’ pricing. Make sure you choose direct competitors who attract your ideal customers. A brewery might draw a very different crowd from a German Bier Haus, even though they serve similar products.
Create your version of popular regional foods. Every year, along with some of the most famous independent restaurants in the world, a local favorite in Nashville makes Restaurant Business’ top-grossing restaurant list. Acme Feed & Seed’s menu offers a curious selection of mashups featuring Southern, Asian, and Cajun cuisine, resulting in Redneck Lo Mein, shrimp and grits, and a dish made with curried chickpeas and coconut rice. It’s weird, but it works.
Think Seasonal
Everyday items are great, but a rotating menu that takes advantage of seasonal foods lowers your food costs. Keep an eye on market and industry trends, food production recalls, and changing climate. If the price of beef is on the rise, plan for a menu that features lots of irresistible pork and chicken dishes.
Fill Plates
Offer a variety of inexpensive, delicious, and filling side dishes and finger foods. Think spaghetti with olive oil and garlic, any kind of french fries, and cheese bread.
Creating a Bar Food Menu to Maximize Profitability
Once you’ve decided what foods to serve, you need to think about variety and presentation. What can you do to make your menu items more appealing?
Offer Flavor Variety
Buffalo Wild Wings is the number one sports bar in the US by a wide margin and a great example of boosting profits with simple steps. They offer a fairly predictable sports bar menu, but their most popular item, wings, comes in 26 flavors.
It’s cheap and easy to offer the same sort of thing—tacos, burgers, nachos, wings—with a big enough flavor variety to please almost anyone. With your best-seller base ingredients the same, plenty of variety can be introduced with toppings, sauces, and spices. A burger topped with a slice of bacon and a fried egg is an entirely different meal from a Philly cheesesteak burger smothered in sautéed onions, green peppers, mushrooms, and provolone, or a garden burger with tomato, sprouts, and avocado. You can even incorporate local flavors to create something new. We crossed the rubicon when Bird’s Eye started selling Buffalo cauliflower. It’s a whole new frontier in flavortown.
Write Mouth-Watering Descriptions
Add as much detail as you can to make your bar food sound delicious and appealing. Vague descriptions result in many time-consuming questions—time your servers could use to circulate, upsell, and provide better customer service. If they spend 10 minutes at every table answering “what’s in this?” questions, it’s time utterly wasted.
Consider Alternate Menu Items
Your customers are your priority, but they have spouses, friends, and family. Ensure your menu has alternate choices to appeal to light eaters, vegetarians, and others who might be along for the ride.
Ditch the Dollar signs
In the “strange but true” file: researchers found that people spend more if the price is listed as a number without a dollar sign. So a dozen Spicy Beach Wings priced at 15 will sell better than a dozen Spicy Beach Wings priced at $14.99.
Track, Score, and Tweak Your Bar Food Menu
With your menu set and kitchen up and running, the last step is tracking your sales. Most POS systems have built-in features to deliver daily sales reports. Divide your menu offerings into four categories:
- Popular and profitable: Score! This is the sweet spot.
- Popular, not profitable: Is there a way you can boost the profitability of this dish without skimping on quality? Make the portion size just a little smaller and add a bigger helping of sides? Find a cheaper source?
- Not popular, profitable: Figure out how you can save this dish. Rework the recipe and pair it with new sides.
- Not popular, not profitable: Phase out the items with the lowest ROI, those that don’t sell well and are costly to plate.
It would be best to keep a food waste log to track food that goes directly to the garbage. We waste a ridiculous amount of food, which is like throwing money in the garbage. Tracking food waste helps you cut down on waste, serve your customers the food they really want to eat, and mitigate spoilage through more efficient ordering.
The bottom line is the most profitable bar foods depend on what your customers prefer. Choose a menu that delights your customers, has an acceptable profit margin, and then prepares and serve delicious recipes. If your customers love what’s on their plates, your brewery budget will be healthy.
