Food festivals to improve restaurant revenue

As the delivery apps gain traction, people are getting accustomed to ordering at home. The convenience of ordering food from their choice of restaurant combined with the efficiency of multi tasking while eating is a great benefit to the modern consumer.

Against this development, restaurants across the country has seen a 15 – 20% drop in covers. Regular guest seek convenience and the ability to choose what they want to have, when they want and where they prefer.

In order to improve your restaurant revenue, as owners or operators, you need to ask this question – How can I get the guest to come to the restaurant?

One such way is by organizing a Food festival. A food festival is a way of offering something new in the restaurant to your guest. There are multiple benefits of organizing a food festival and they can be divided as benefit to guest and to your team members.

Benefit to guest

Experiential offering:

A food festival tried to capture the experience of the place of the event and can transport the guest to a different land by bringing in the flavours. As a generation of customers value experience more, a well executed event can help bring in a set of customers who will come in to dine in your restaurant

Benefit to the hotel

New offering:

As an experiential product, the restaurant can market the festival there by generating awareness about the hotel. This helps the long term brand recall and there by generating foot fall

Training platform for team:

Any food festival that happens in the hotel will involve preparation and some amount of research to provide an authentic experience to the guest. This preparation helps in training the team to a different cuisine, which if found popular can even be added later in the a la carte menu

Impact of food festivals on the restaurant

A well executed food festival can be highly profitable. On the other hand a food festival that does not generate enough excitement and foot fall can be unprofitable for the restaurant as any food festival will have some additional cost. Hence it is a strategy that can help or harm your profitability.

Before you begin planning, the food and beverage manager should make a Profit and Loss statement for the food festivals and forecast the revenue and the expenses. After the festival is over a critique should be done with the actual revenue and expenses to understand if the festival was profitable as was forecasted or not.

In conclusion

Food festival is a way of creating awareness about your hotel or restaurant

It provides benefits to the guest and hotel

However it needs to be properly evaluated to see if the strategy is profitable or not and supported with proper Profit and Loss statement