7 Reasons New Restaurants Fail (How to Succeed Instead)

Starting a restaurant? A healthy fear of restaurant failure isn’t a bad thing. But no need to panic. The latest research found that only 17% of new restaurants fail in the first year. Instead of focusing on how to survive, learn to thrive. Let this list of 7 reasons for restaurant failure – and how to avoid them – be your guide.

1) The Fail: Poor Planning

You know the saying. Fail to plan, plan to fail. To prepare for success and reduce the risk of restaurant failure, start with a business plan for opening a new restaurant. As you write your plan, pay close attention to these 3 critical variables.

• Wrong Location: The #1 Reason for Restaurant Failure

Experts agree, the most common reason for restaurant failure is choosing a bad location. To find the perfect place, look for spots with plentiful foot and vehicle traffic. What’s nearby? A college campus or office building with potential customers? Dig deep. What business was there before? Were they victims of restaurant failure?

• Customer-Focused Concept and Name

Reality is your friend. You may dream of opening a fancy French restaurant. But if you’re in a blue-collar community, that concept is ripe for restaurant failure. Use these steps to select a successful concept:

1. First, do a demographic analysis. Who lives in a 10-mile radius of your restaurant? Middle class families or trendy young professionals? More seniors or singles? Are there seasonal customers?
2. Build your restaurant concept around the customers identified in the first step. For example, a bistro with global flavors (and a large bar area for socializing) would be ideal if catering to a younger crowd with adventurous palates. Your concept should also be unique and different from other restaurants in town.
3. Select a name that describes your concept. Do your homework to ensure the name isn’t trademarked or could be confused with a competitor.To read full article click on the link

How to Boost Profits Without Selling More Drinks – Your Guide to Strategic Drink Pricing

 With a few pricing adjustments, and a slight shift in pricing strategy, most bars and restaurants could add significant profits without selling more drinks.

The key is moving from an overly simplistic pricing model to a more strategic pricing model. The industry standard is to group brands into different categories and then apply a standard mark-up in each category. For example, a bar might mark-up their well liquor brands by 9x the cost and their premiums by 4x the cost.

This approach was necessary years ago when most bars used a simple cash register with keys limited to “well”, “call”, “premium”, “domestic beer”, etc. But with today’s Point-of-Sales (POS) technology, you can, and should, set the optimal price for each and every drink to maximize profits.

How much are you charging for Tito’s vodka?

Before we get into an analytical look at the important variables to consider, let’s start by asking a simple question: how much are you charging for Tito’s Vodka?

In Southern California, Tito’s costs $21.50, roughly the same cost as Absolut vodka. So most of our clients apply the same mark-up and charge the same price as Absolut – let’s say $6.25.

Sounds reasonable but that thinking is too simplistic: the fact is that most of your guests regard Tito’s as a premium brand. They regard Tito’s as a “better” brand than Absolut but perhaps not quite as “premium” as Grey Goose – more or less at the same level as Ciroc vodka which is priced at $7.25 at many establishments. Because your guest believes Tito’s is as good as Ciroc, you should charge $7 or $7.25 for Tito’s.

If a bar sells 150 Tito’s every week and they adjusted their pricing to that of Ciroc, they would make an extra $7,800 in pure profit per year. That’s just one example of how a strategic pricing approach can be more profitable.

You should be charging more for your premium brands

Economists talk about a concept called the “price elasticity of demand” which translated into English means “how sensitive are your customers to price changes?” When you think about someone who might buy an $80 Wagu steak, for example, you can imagine that sales wouldn’t drop much if the price was increased to $95, nor would sales increase all that much if they lowered the price to $65. That reflects low price elasticity: the customer ordering a Wagu steak just isn’t that worried about the price.

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Aldi: Green Alcohol-infused cheese, stouts, and Irish Bangers just in time for St.Patty's Day!

Aldi Is Selling Green and Alcohol-Infused Cheese for St. Patrick's Day

By EMILY PRICE 

February 25, 2019

Aldi is gearing up for St. Patrick’s Day by adding two specialty cheeses to its store shelves. The two kinds of cheese, a Pesto Gouda and an English Sage Derby, will each be sold for around $4 and have one unique thing in common: they’re green.

The cheeses will officially make their debut in stores on Wednesday, USA Todayreports.

Along with those green cheeses, Aldi is also bringing back its Irish Truckle Assortment for the holiday. Also priced at $4, the trio of cheeses includes an aged Irish cheddar as well as two alcohol-infused kinds of cheese, one infused with beer and the other whiskey.

The cheeses aren’t the only St. Patrick’s Day fare that Aldi will be offering this year. The store’s section for the day also includes Irish stout, Guinness Beer Bread mix, Shepard’s Pie, and a package of Irish-style bangers.

While it’s not Irish whiskey, last year, Aldi’s scotch whisky was named one of the world’s best by trade publication The Spirits business. Aldi’s Highland Black Scotch Whisky also won the gold in the 12 years and younger category at the Spirits business Scotch Whisky Masters.

Aldi currently has 1,600 stores in the United States spread across 35 different states. In 2017, the company said that it hopes to expand its U.S. store base to 2,500 by 2022.

For full article and video click here

Alcohol delivery and take home wine? What a time to be alive.

Pour yourself a drink: Bills would allow alcohol delivery and take-home wine!

SANTA FE, N.M. (KRQE) - Get ready to raise your glass. A couple of bills at the State Capitol would make it easier to take home partially consumed wine, and even have alcohol delivered to your front door.

State lawmakers said they hope these bills are ways to reduce DWI's.

"We have two wonderful wineries in my district, in Luna County, and so the wine growers in the state have been trying to get this legislation passed so that it encourages people to come to their winery, taste wine, purchase wine and still be able to take a partially consumed bottle home," said Rep. Candie Sweetser, (D) Deming.

Rep. Sweetser is sponsoring House Bill 549, which would allow people who don't quite finish their bottle of wine bought at a winery to take it home. The winery would have to re-cork the bottle, seal it in a tamper-proof bag with the receipt before you leave. 

Over in the Senate, there's another liquor bill in the works.

"It is an attempt to try to foster the tourism business," said Sen. Gerald Ortiz y Pino, (D) Albuquerque. "Foster people having nice meals at home provided by a local restaurant...Instead of having to get dressed up and go out, you can have the same experience in the comfort of your own home."

Senate Bill 484, sponsored by Senator Ortiz y Pino, could let you stay at home and get beer or wine delivered to you. But there's a catch: you have to order $25 worth of food from a restaurant to also order alcohol. Sen. Ortiz y Pino said local delivery services would have to check your ID before giving you the alcohol.

Both lawmakers stressed the importance of reducing DWI's, as well as seeing this as an opportunity for local businesses.

Rep. Sweetser's wine bill unanimously passed in the House Commerce and Economic Development Committee. It's now headed to the floor.

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FL Dog park meets full bar

Bark park with a bar; new Florida dog park to serve alcohol

By Jeff Tavss 

ORLANDO - Leave it to Florida to find a way to combine dog play with alcohol.

A new dog park in Orlando will include a full-service bar when it opens later this summer, according to WESH. Boozehounds Dog Bar is the creation of two University of Central Florida graduates who may have come up with this not-so-harebrained idea while on a college bender.

Along with the actual bar, there will be televisions and plenty of space for Fido and Rover to play. Boozehounds will sell passes to the dog bar, with a monthly pass costing a fun-loving dog owner just $20.

Not just any dog will be welcomed at Boozehounds. Rules state that dogs must be over 4 months old, while all dogs over 8 months old must be spayed or neutered.

Boozy Keurigs

Now there is a Keurig for booze and it can make everything from margaritas to Moscow mules

Author: Samantha Kubota

Published: 9:46 PM EST February 20, 2019

WASHINGTON, D.C., USA — It’s maybe not what we needed, but it’s what is happening: a Kurig that makes boozy beverages.

Keurig and Anheuser-Busch InBev got together to launch “Drinkworks,” a machine that can make chilled alcoholic drink with only a pod.

The machine will be able to make cocktails, brews, ciders with the touch of a button, and will offer 24 different drinks to start.

Insider reports the machine will run you $299, plus about $4 a pod and $7 for CO2 tanks.

The machine is only available in St. Louis, Missouri for now, but plans to launch in other states – including Florida and California – this summer.

Worth noting, you cannot make regular coffee K cups in this machine and you have to keep the boozy pods in the fridge. CHEERS!

Beer flips - Raw egg, Beer, spirits, and sugar??

Beer flips are the beer-and-whole egg cocktail—wait, hear me out

By Kate Bernot

Gee, Kate, when are you going to share a recipe for a cocktail that includes hot beer and a whole egg? 

Okay, no one’s ever asked me that, so I’ve taken matters into my own hands. I wanted to learn more about a category of cocktails called flips, which involve beer, a spirit, and an egg, because if there are three substances I always have on hand, it’s beer, booze, and eggs.

Marina Holter, lead bartender at The Whistler in Chicago (and a big flip fan), tells me these are some of the oldest cocktails around, dating back to the 1690s. They originated as nearly equal-parts cocktails: People mixed even amounts of brandy, egg, sugar, then topped it with beer and sometimes inserted a hot soldering iron to froth the beer and heat the drink. Refrigeration wasn’t an option then, so people were used to drinking beer lukewarm or even hot.

If you’ve had hot mulled wine, you can imagine the combination of sugar and warm alcohol that makes a beer flip appealing on a blustery, cold night. But what about that egg? It’s the detail that stops many drinkers in their flip-ordering path, but Holter says you shouldn’t knock it until you’ve tried it. 

“I wouldn’t ever straight-up crack an egg and chug it, but it tastes so good in these drinks. It makes flips a hardy, sweeter cocktail, something decadent without being too bad,” she says. “I don’t want to drink melted ice cream, but I want that in cocktail form.”

For full article and recipe click the link