Data Driven Decisions for Food & Beverage

Wenty’s Leagues Club. A Future Food project

Data Driven Decisions for Food & Beverage

The hospitality industry is undergoing significant change. After the pressures of 2020 & 2021, the food and hospitality industries have (as always) adapted. In many businesses, this has triggered the adoption of new practices, new standards of hygiene protocol, the evolution of service models and the accelerated adoption of technological innovation. 

Future Food has also been working behind the scenes to develop new internal technological innovation & capability. Locked down by an inability to travel, we took the opportunity to construct a new approach to our research, collation and benchmarking approach. The last two years have provided the space and time to consider our own practices, to strengthen our strategic platforms and reduce the level of hypothesis that we typically utilise in development of a business case by increasing our data collection and analysis capability. The aim is always to understand more about our data, to develop solutions to compile, review and manage the weight of the (ever-growing) data at our disposal to provide our clients the best intelligence with which to shape their food and hospitality strategies.

One of the most fundamental shifts in our data over recent years is the increasing specialisation of industry sub-sectors that we interface with. Historically Future Food has been substantively oriented towards retail food strategies, particularly within Shopping Centres and commercial buildings. The last five years has seen a tremendous shift in our Client base as we develop a greater range of specialisations through our diverse project resumé.  

Consistent with the developing industry, it is vital that our internal methodologies transition from a retail food philosophy to the development of project specific hospitality frameworks set alongside quantifiable parameters and variables (i.e. target markets and their quantifiable spend). The result is advanced business modelling that allow us to investigate a range of possibilities of specific strategic aims, empowering our Clients to make data driven decisions.  

Whilst food can be broken up into categories such as ‘Cafes & Restaurants’ or ‘Takeaway Food,’ the reality of successful projects is that food, beverage and hospitality is far more nuanced than that. It is made up of a myriad of influencing factors that contribute to the picture of success painted by best practice developments (& redevelopments). It is important to maximise revenue to operator (and subsequently rental revenue and asset value) by ensuring that the planned hospitality strategy meets delivers a tailored experience rather than a default revenue stream and a generic F&B mix.

Source: Future Food In-house database

Source: Future Food In-house database

Understanding project specific benchmarks (i.e. by volume of demand, size, location, customer demographic, footfall or project type) and the factors of success that shape those projects, informs core strategies that can shape our ideas to grant clients and developers the ability to optimise their projects consistent with their own unique strategy drivers. 

Future Food’s new data resources allow us to study and quantify in even greater detail and nuance, the competitive landscape surrounding a project; the classification of the target user group spending parameters and how this aligns with a given F&B offer; and the development of project-specific decision hierarchies.

It provides a vehicle on which to map the preferences of a series of target markets/users networked to specific food/hospitality frameworks. This in of course, weighted by the quantum of demand that specific user groups may have, their spending profiles (time of day, average spend and frequency of spend)
and appropriately provides a rationale that targets the maximum available F&B spend by aligning
products to people.  

Outside of masterplanning and strategy, this is particularly useful when developing F&B concepts & aligning them to their architectural envelope, it provides our Clients with the science behind the creativity; or when determining the most suitable operators for direct approach in an EOI Campaign. Data is the empowerment that our Clients crave, and the reason that we continue to push onward in the pursuit of the future of food.