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December 4, 2023What food should I serve in my pub?
Serving good food is crucial for a pub. In the post-COVID environment, restaurant revenues have grown 5.2% year-on-year, forecasted to grow to £19.5bn by 2026. One in three Brits visit their local pub for a meal at least once a month, and 38% of pub-goers say they are likely to visit food-led pubs more often over the next 12 months.
Moreover, pubs with strong food offerings encourage customers to drink even more and stay longer at your pub, making them essential to your venue. However, there's a lot to consider to find the perfect food to offer to your customers. That's why we've built a comprehensive guide to help you find your pub's most effective food offering. To build this food offering, there are a few key factors that you MUST consider if you want food to be an asset to your pub ...

1) Popularity
If your food is unpopular, then it will fail to enhance your offering and may even negatively impact your pub. Obviously, the quality of food comes into play, but so does the recognition of your dishes and the value for money for the consumer. As a rough gauge, your food costs should be around 30% of your total food-led revenue - although we'll touch on this later on in the article.
When selecting your dishes you can't go wrong with the crowd favourites. In fact, Nisbet did a study looking at Britain's favourite pub meals - which were ranked as the following:
- Sunday Roast
- Fish & Chips
- Steak & Chips
- Hunter's Chicken
- Scampi
2) Customers
Your customers should be at the heart of everything you do. You need to think about the type of people in your area that your pub attracts, and how you can best cater to them. Are you a food-led gastro pub focussing on family meals? Or maybe you're a wet-led rural pub where your customers aren't fussed about what they eat, so long as it's something. You need to consider your customer base wants and place it central to what you do.
Tying in with this, it's important to consider your customers' experience and environment. Are there lots of tables available for customers to sit and eat at? Or should you focus more on 'finger food'? Every aspect of your customer's experience should be paramount and feed into your choice of food available.
3) Complexity & Staffing
Compared to drinks, preparing food usually leads to higher staffing costs – which only rise as the dishes get more complex. Therefore, try to stick to dishes that require minimum difficulty and can be cooked in bulk when ordered, ensuring that the cost of a chef is spread across more meals.
4) Pricing
When building a menu, it's crucial to balance quality ingredients against the product's margin. In fact, the quality of produce is the most important part of eating out for 43% of Brits. Therefore, try to consider items that can have high-quality produce and still give you high margins. These higher-margin items could include:
- Burgers (average gross profit (GP) of around 78%).
- Chips (average GP of around 85%).
- Pizzas (average GP of around 83%).
For restaurants, gross profit on a product should normally be around 70%, therefore, a careful selection of ingredients and costings of your products is crucial to get a clear picture of your profitability. From here, you should balance the preparation time with the ingredient costs to create a high-margin, winning menu.
5) Your strengths & weaknesses
When building your food options, you should also consider your strengths if you'll be in charge of the food preparation. Perhaps your family has an excellent traditional recipe passed on through the generations, or maybe you don't know a thing about cooking. If you're in the kitchen, then these are also crucial factors to consider.
So, in short, you first need to consider your customers and environment to determine what food suits your venue best. From here, add any recipes catered to your strengths, and look at the high-margin items listed alongside some of the most popular dishes. Then cost each dish and work backwards to streamline your restaurant’s menu.