Raising the Bar on Profits: Mastering the Art of Food-Based Happy Hour Specials

Unlock the secret to a bustling bar and higher profits with our latest Bar Business Podcast episode, guiding you through the game-changing strategy of food-based happy hour specials. Imagine your patrons lingering for just one more drink, enticed by irresistible food discounts that perfectly complement your beverages. We'll dissect the numbers behind why offering mouth-watering deals on appetizers and snacks isn't just good for your customers' appetites—it's smart business. From navigating different regional liquor laws to boosting your bottom line, we've got the recipe for happy hour success.

Step into the world of strategic menu planning as we explore the most delectable and profitable food selections for your happy hour crowd. Fried, salty, and utterly tempting, these treats are designed to keep the drinks flowing. Discover how the historical roots of tapas can inspire your own promotional efforts and why complimentary snacks might just be your secret weapon in cultivating a vibrant bar scene. We'll share insights on creating a unique happy hour food menu that not only satisfies cravings but also encourages patrons to stay a little longer—and order another round or two.

To wrap up this masterclass in happy hour innovation, we focus on the art of promotion. Learn how to make your food specials the talk of the town with savvy marketing tactics, from eye-catching imagery to social media buzz. We'll cover the essentials of staff training, ensuring your team is as enthusiastic about the specials as you are, and the crucial role of SEO in making sure your happy hour stands out in a sea of online searches. Say goodbye to underwhelming promotions and hello to a happy hour that's not just memorable, but a magnet for profit and pleasure. Cheers to your bar's new chapter of success—tune in and toast to a happier happy hour!

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Welcome to the Bar Business Podcast, the ultimate resource for bar owners looking to elevate their businesses to the next level. Our podcast is packed with valuable insights, expert advice, and inspiring stories from successful bar owners and industry professionals. Tune in to learn everything from how to craft the perfect cocktail menu to how to manage your staff effectively. Our mission is to help you thrive in the competitive bar industry and achieve your business goals.

Special thank you to our benchmarking data partner Starfish. Starfish works with your bookkeeping software by using AI to help you make smart data-driven decisions and maximize your profits while giving you benchmarking data to understand how you compare to the industry at large.

For more information on how to spend less time working in your bar and more time working on your bar:
The Bar Business Podcast Website
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Chris' Book 'How to Make Top-Shelf Profits in the Bar Business'
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Transcript

Announcer: 0:00

You're listening to the Bar Business Podcast where every week, your host, chris Schneider, brings you information, strategies and news on the bar industry, giving you the competitive edge you need to start working on your bar rather than in your bar.

Chris Schneider: 0:21

Welcome to this week's edition of the Bar Business Podcast, your ultimate resource for bar owners. I'm your host, chris Schneider. In today's episode, we'll be delving into the value of having a food-based happy hour special. So I know a lot of you probably run happy hour specials, but the fact of the matter is happy hour specials are not the same everywhere around the world. They're not the same everywhere around the United States because there are some restrictions and different things that affect what we can do for happy hour specials. One way around worrying about the liquor laws and we'll get into more of the laws that affect happy hours here in a minute but one way around those is to focus on selling food rather than drinks as a happy hour special.

Chris Schneider: 1:05

Now, as I'm sure you're all aware, you need discount and promotional strategies in order to help pull in guests, in order to make sure that your bar is constantly busy, and there are a lot of different ways we can do this. But food is a way that a lot of bars don't think of special on cocktails, or a special on beer, or buckets of beer or pitchers of beer all really common Food. You see less promotion around, but food is actually a great way to sell more drinks. So while we're talking about discounting food, what we're really talking about is selling more drinks, because that's our goal. In the bar business. Our highest margin comes in on drinks, and the more drinks we can responsibly sell, the more money we can make. So we need to use food and everything else in our establishments as a tool, essentially to sell more drinks. And the reason why food helps us sell more drinks is that people that buy food tend to stay longer. So most of you probably have seen at least a few episodes of Bar Rescue, and one of the things that you'll hear John Taffer say over and, over and over again is that people that eat food stay, on average, 52 minutes longer. Now, I'm not sure where he got that data from, to be real honest with you, but it's not a reach to say when people order food, they're going to stay 45 minutes to an hour longer, and when they stay that hour longer, those 45 minutes longer, what ends up happening is that they tend to have more drinks. So food is a way not only to encourage length of stay to be longer, but also is a way to raise those guest checks, both from the food and the additional drinks that you sell because of the food. The other thing that I really like about food specials and this is kind of counterintuitive. So bear with me Food specials tend not to cut into your margins as much as alcohol specials, and I know what you're saying.

Chris Schneider: 3:03

Well, I have a higher cost percentage on food, so when I discount food I make less money. And we will go through some math here that shows why that common conception may be a little bit off. But think about this for a second. You have your highest margin on alcohol If your food cost is. Let's say you have a high food cost. Your food cost is 50% and let's just say that your average alcohol cost or beverage cost is 25%. So you discount each of those items 50%. On the alcohol you're now have a margin of 50% To start with, 75%. We're discounting 50%. You still have 25% margin. On the food you now have a 0% margin. So you're not making a penny on the food compared to cost if you discounted that 50%. But in a bar almost no one is just going to order food. So you're still making all that profit on your alcohol sales. And like I said, we'll get into the math of this in a few minutes.

Chris Schneider: 4:02

But first let's just talk quickly about what a happy hour is, because happy hour, like I said, means different things in different places, partially because of the way people view it, but really because of the actual laws surrounding happy hour specials. So at its most basic, happy hour is a time limited promotion. It's time limited within a day, so usually happy hour is focused on after work periods of time so say like three to five, four to six. Rarely do you see it going to seven, eight, nine o'clock because, well, now we're into dinner time. Some bars that are more late night bars may extend their happy hour that late, but anywhere that's going to do a dinner business is going to cut off happy hour before their dinner business comes in. And again it's really just to pull in those after work folks to grab a drink on their way home. Now one of the reasons why happy hour does it not quite work the same way that it did, say, 40 years ago in the 80s, is that less people grab drinks on their way home, and there's all sorts of reasons for that. Our culture has changed. Drunk driving is a whole different thing than it was then as far as how it's enforced. But the bottom line here is happy hour. At its root is a time limited promotion that generally happens in the after work or end of work hours of the day.

Chris Schneider: 5:28

Now, as I mentioned, happy hour is not the same everywhere, and so, if we just look at the United States, there are only 18 states that have happy hours without restrictions, where you can do whatever you want. In nine states, including Indiana, where I am, happy hours are illegal, just period, and most of the reason why they're illegal is because of drunk driving. It's people going and having drinks after work, getting drunk driving home and causing accidents. That is the public safety argument for almost every restriction or ban of happy hours, whether in where I am, in Indiana or anywhere around the world. In addition to being banned outright in nine states, some states limit when happy hour can occur, so the actual hours, how long your discount can last, so it might be limited to two or three or four hours. Some states regulate what can be discounted and a number of states ban all you can drink special. So think of you pay 50 bucks and drink as much as you can, between three and five. That's illegal in a number of states. Similarly, ireland and France ban happy hours outright, as does the city of Glasgow, and there are plenty of other places around the world that have some form of restriction on happy hours. So when you look at what happens in, say, a state like California, where there are zero restrictions on happy hour, versus where I am, where you can't have happy hour at all, versus, say, nevada, where there's a limit on I believe they ban all you can drink happy hours and there are a couple other limits that they impose there's no way to say, hey, here's a happy hour strategy that works everywhere, but almost nowhere bans time-based food specials. So when it comes to the food side of the business, there is a way to say, hey, here's something that you can do anywhere in the world pretty much, and it can be effective. And again, I think in a lot of ways, food-based specials are going to give you better benefits than alcohol-based specials. So let's get into some details here about why food discounts as a time-limited happy hour special can work better than alcohol discounts.

Chris Schneider: 7:45

Now, as you know, we're in business to make money. That's something we talk about a lot, right? Yes, we're in business to serve people. Yes, we're in business to build a community. All of those things are absolutely true. But fundamentally, every single person that owns a business, every small business owner in the world, regardless of what industry you're in, your goal is to make money, support your family, have the life that you want, and so our goal is always to increase our sales and maximize our profits. So we have to look at any program we're looking at, any special that we're thinking of doing in that way. Now we're going to walk through a couple scenarios here that show some of the benefits that food happy hours can have over alcohol-based happy hours. We are going to make some assumptions here and we're going to fly through some math pretty quick. So this may be slightly hard to follow in audio, but if you want to see this all written out, tomorrow on the blog, on the Bar Business Podcast website, we will have a blog post posted for this episode that goes into all the details and shows all the math for you. So just know that you can go to the podcast website, see the blog, and that will go through all this math as well.

Chris Schneider: 9:03

Now for our assumptions. As we go through this, we're assuming it's after work, so we're not looking at people spending hours upon hours. We're talking about an hour, maybe two, that they're in our bar and we're assuming that we're not selling super high-end cocktails. We're just kind of working with a neighborhood bar type concept here. So let's say, a guest comes in and they have two rum and coax for $7.50 each and they order some nachos that are $12.50. Now if we're discounting those, if we have a 50% discount on cocktails, essentially they're getting a BOGO, a buy one, get one on the cocktail. So they're sending $7.50 on two cocktails plus getting nachos for $12.50, their total bill is $20. Now if the discount was 50% off the food, those two cocktails equal $15, the food is $12.50, so the half of $12.50, $6.25, we're now bringing in $21.25 instead of $20, selling the exact same thing to the exact same customer. So you can see right there that $1.25 extra over time would add up.

Chris Schneider: 10:15

Obviously, though, your food cost is going to be higher than your beverage cost. In this case, it's going to make your food cost look even higher. But rather than worry about individual cost in this scenario, what matters is total revenue. Our goal is total revenue because we're spending the same amount on two cocktails, two rum and coax and in order of nachos. Regardless of what we're discounting, our cost is identical. So by discounting the food we're getting more revenue than by discounting the booze.

Chris Schneider: 10:47

That example, though, is based on one person coming in, and most of the time, especially after work, you don't just have one person coming in. So let's say two people came in, they both had two rum and coax, and they split in order of nachos. Our total bill would be $42.50, but if we're discounting the cocktails 50%, we're giving them a $15 discount. So our sales is $27.50. We're discounting the food 50%, while we're bringing in $42.50, our discount is still only $6.25, meaning we're bringing in $36.25. It's a difference of almost $9, which is a huge difference to your bottom line.

Chris Schneider: 11:30

But let's look at an even more striking example. So guess that eat, we know, will stay, on average, about an hour longer. So if they're staying an hour longer, they're probably going to order a third cocktail, as opposed to just having two cocktails, if they don't order food. Now it's also assumed, for the sake of this example, that the reason that they ordered the nachos? After work, everybody wants a little snack, but you're going to have dinner later. You're not really looking to get food, but you're kind of hungry.

Chris Schneider: 12:03

So let's say the reason they ordered the nachos in the first place was that they were discounted. So we're selling three rum and coax to each person and in order of nachos. But if the food's not on special, we're just selling two rum and coax to the same people. So if we're just selling two rum and coax, that's $30 worth of sales, it's 50% off, it's a $15 discount, that's $15 in revenue. But if we have the food, we know that makes them stay longer, they're going to order that third drink.

Chris Schneider: 12:34

Before the discount our sales are $57.50 because that's three rum and coax apiece, plus the nachos. Now we're going to discount that because it's 50% off food $6.25, which gives us total revenue of $51.25. I don't know about you guys, but I'd much rather ring $51 than $15. So there's a huge difference here and there's also the psychology of what food does to our guests. It's going to make them stay longer, it's going to make them have that extra drink. So food specials use properly. The math is absolutely compelling that the results are better, much better than a drink special alone, because a drink special alone you're not encouraging that food sale, you're not encouraging your guests to stay longer.

Chris Schneider: 13:25

Now, at the end of this episode, we'll get into some practical points here that show some of the pitfalls in this math and some potential issues that exist with only focusing on food based happy hours. I'm sure there are some of you right now yelling at whatever device you're playing this on, thinking yeah, that makes sense, the math is right, but I don't buy your argument. So we'll get into some cases where this argument does and does not work later, but for the time being, it's absolutely true and no one can argue the fact that when people eat, they tend to stay longer. When people stay longer, they tend to drink more. That means higher sales and if we're looking at discounting cocktails over food, if we can make our food discount attractive to our guests and bring people in the door, we're almost guaranteed to ring more overall with a food discount than we are with a cocktail discount, assuming that we were going to discount them both by the same amount.

Chris Schneider: 14:28

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Chris Schneider: 15:07

Let's talk a little bit about what food discounts work best, because if you're going to do a food discount, you need to be targeted. You need to pick the items that are going to both be attractive to your guests and have the most impact on your bottom line. Now, as we get into this, absolutely true that you can do basically anything you want, but being able to do anything you want doesn't mean that you should just put some discount ideas on the wall and throw a dart at it and pick one. You need to be strategic. So, generally speaking, we're talking after work. We're not talking people that want to raise big amounts of food. They're not there for dinner, they're there to grab a snack on their way home.

Chris Schneider: 15:50

So, generally, the best foods to discount are going to be your appetizers, small plates, snacks, and you don't want to discount too many items. One thing that you'll see a lot of people do is they'll say well, all our appetizers are half price and frankly, that has never made sense to me. If you're going to make all of the food on your menu half price, you're not picking the items that are going to provide you the best value from your guests, and what I mean from that. So let's say we have a higher end bar and we're looking at all the appetizers and there's a shrimp cocktail on there, there's maybe crab cakes, maybe there's some scallops, maybe there's filet tips. All of those have very high food costs. All of those, when you discount them, are going to cut into your sales significantly and they're going to hurt your cost significantly. But more than that, all of those are foods that are not necessarily going to encourage people to drink.

Chris Schneider: 16:54

The foods that make people drink the most are fried, salty foods. So when we're doing happy hour specials, we should be really focused on fried salty foods, because that's what's going to generate the revenue, not chose. They're not fried. The chips are fried, though, and it's salty. That's going to encourage people to drink fried cheese cubes, mozzarella sticks, things of that nature, going to encourage people to drink. Fried chicken, french fries, tater tots loaded tater tots if you're in Canada poutine all these things will encourage people to drink more. So pick food that is fried, salty. You can even go sweet to encourage people to drink, because these are the foods that are going to make people thirsty.

Chris Schneider: 17:42

Now the other way you can go is not pick food from your menu at all. You can come up with a happy hour snack list that has nothing to do with the food on your menu. Now that can get really interesting, because you're not discounting your food items. You're coming up with additional food items available during a short period of time, made to be in smaller portions that fit people's wants after work, that are also fried and salty, and going to encourage them to drink more. If you go this route, just make sure that they're cheap, right? You don't have to always discount your stuff. You can have a five items under five dollars during happy hour special. That works just fine. Or seven items under seven dollars and by saying X number of items under X number of dollars, it's great for your marketing, it's catchy. People will see that, they'll understand it, they'll grasp on to it. But once you pick the food assuming that you're not doing a snack menu that's totally different than your regular menu once you pick the food that you're going to discount what is the right discount? And, frankly, 50% off is the easy one. 50% off it's catchy, it's attractive, it makes sense to people.

Chris Schneider: 19:02

Another thing you can do is go with free food. Now, free food does not have to be anything fancy. Free food can be something really, really simple and not on your regular menu. So, as you guys know, I'm in Indiana. Indiana is not a southern state per se, but we definitely have our southern influences here, and one thing that is popular, especially among baby boomers your older or crowd in Indiana is pork rinds. So, as silly as it sounds, I used to do free pork rinds during happy hour and it actually increased my business. It's fried, it's salty, it's crunchy, it's all those wonderful things, and because of that I was just giving away free food. But I was also encouraging people to drink more. And I'll tell you right now, pork rinds are not expensive. There's not a huge demand on those because, let's be honest, most people under 50 are not particularly interested in pork rinds. But if you live in a state or an area or have a demographic that likes them. It's a great thing to put on the bar. You could also go with something much more normal, like Chex Mix or nuts, anything like that that you can put on the bar. That's just free food you're giving away, but it's also encouraging people to drink more, encouraging them to stay longer. So free food can work.

Chris Schneider: 20:23

And what's really interesting with the free food thing here just to take a step back and talk a little bit of bar history real quick is free food to get people to drink more after work is the origin of the whole concept of tapas, which has become our small plates here in the United States, and all our small plate recipes are based on the Spanish idea of tapas, and tapas actually means topper. So what would happen is in Spain, after work, people go out and they'd have drinks. In Spain's a warm country, a lot of people sat outside and the big drink in Spain is wine. People are not necessarily drinking beer after work. They're more likely to drink wine after work and they're sitting outside, and if we know anything about sitting outside when it's warm and drinking wine flies, like to get in your wine. So people started to put their bread plates on top of their wine glasses, because now the fly cannot get in the wine. And some really smart bar owners looked at that and they said oh shit, I know how I'm going to get people to stay at my bar longer and not go to the other bars. I'm going to put food on top of their plate. And it worked. It encouraged more guests to come in. It encouraged more wine sales.

Chris Schneider: 21:32

So the idea of giving a little bit of a free food to keep people after work and have them drink more and visit your establishment more is a really really old one and it's a really really good one. Now, if you don't want to give away free food, like I said, 50% off is a great way to go. You can also go Bogo right Buy one, get one, buy one appetizer, get one free. Buy one appetizer, get one 50% off. You can do all those sorts of tactics as well, although I will say I'm not as big for happy hour on a Bogo as a straight percentage off, because these are people that are not having dinner. They're trying to have a snack, a little bit of food, after work. We want to give them food so that they stay longer, but we're really not discussing a full meal here. The other thing with discounts is really this can be as great as your imagination. You can discount anything you want, any way you want.

Chris Schneider: 22:29

Just remember that the math needs to work. You need to still be making money and it needs to increase your sales and optimize your profits, not cut into your sales and decrease your profits. Once you have an idea of what your happy hour special should be or your food based happy hour special, I should say to be a little bit more specific here you have to figure out how to promote it, because one of the absolute true things in business, and especially in the bar business, is promotions don't work unless you promote them. People need to know your specials. It needs to drive people in the door. If you don't tell anyone about it, it's not worth the discount. You're not going to increase your sales in a way that the increased sales cover the expense of the discount. You're better off just doing nothing.

Chris Schneider: 23:19

So anytime you're going to have a promotion and I don't care if it's a food based happy hour special or any other promotion that you have in your bar anytime you're going to have a promotion, you have to promote it, and that comes in in both internal and external marketing. And, as we've talked about, internal marketing, the way that I use it means anything within the four walls of your establishment, and external marketing is everything outside the four walls of your establishment. When it comes to your internal marketing, there are going to be two major things to accomplish in order to promote your food based happy hour special, or really any promotion. As I mentioned earlier, the two things are training your team, making sure that they have the tools and the knowledge they need to sell it, and then putting some things around your bar that let people know about the special, because, while your team is always the best people to sell things, they absolutely need to be trained on thing. It's important that you also have signage that is going to tell someone that comes in at midnight about the special, because your team is probably not selling that special at midnight. They're not talking to people about what happens between four and six, six hours after that promotion is over. But let's start by honing in here a little bit on training your team. So they need to know exactly what the special is and they need to know the details. They need to be able to recite and, just off the cuff, explain what's going on. So you need to train them, you need to give them materials that explain the discount.

Chris Schneider: 24:50

Now let's say that you're doing some free items that are not on your menu, or you're doing a specific five under five or seven under seven type menu that is not your normal menu. Well then, anybody that works during that happy hour period needs to have intimate familiarity with those items. One of the things that I will say over and over again and I have here on the podcast, I do to coaching clients, I talk to you, I do in the things that I write If your team has not tried something, there's no way they can speak about it. When a customer says, hey, how is X and you're serve responsible, why haven't tried it? But a lot of people order it and they say it's really good. That is not going to sell anyone anything. It's a bad response, and the reason why you get that response at a lot of bars and a lot of restaurants is that they're not making sure that their team has tried an item.

Chris Schneider: 25:50

So make sure your team tries everything. Make sure that if it is a free item or it's a different menu item than what you normally serve. They've tried it and they have full details on the special, what it is, when it is, how it exists. And for those food items, they should have full details on those too. What are the ingredients, how is it prepared, what is special about that food item? And then, as I mentioned, the second thing that we need to worry about with internal marketing is some kind of signage, because, again, your team, even if they're trained perfectly, even if they can describe it perfectly and tell everyone about their personal experience, they're not going to do that at midnight when the special ended at six. So you need some kind of signage, something in your bar internally that I guess that's inside can see.

Chris Schneider: 26:39

Maybe that's on your table tents. I think every bar in the world should have table tents on every table and those shouldn't just be used for what you normally see, maybe a cocktail list or a wine list. Those should be used for promotional activities, to tell people what's going on and make people excited about things that are happening in the bar. So a table tent would be a great place to push your happy hour special and if you were doing one of those menus like seven under seven, just put that happy hour menu there. Explain what's going on. Now, maybe you don't want to put the happy hour menu on the table tents because you're going to print those out. You're going to change what those seven items are every week based upon what you can get a deal on from your supplier to cut down your food cost, to make it easier to provide that food item under $7. So maybe you don't give all the food items, but give people an idea of what's going on, give them some specifics that are going to wet their palate a little bit and make them want to come in for that food happy hour special.

Chris Schneider: 27:39

If you're not using table tents, you could use other signage around your bar, whether that's flyers and we can have a whole conversation about flyers on walls. I'm not a huge fan, but you can frame them and they look great. Or you could use chalkboards that you have and have somebody that has good handwriting and can do some art, draw a nice picture and really spell out what that special is on the chalkboard. So those are some ideas for your internal marketing. Now let's talk about external marketing. So external marketing is stuff that happens when people are not in your establishment and, let's be honest, most specials.

Chris Schneider: 28:16

You're not going to do any traditional media here. I really don't think traditional media works in the for most bars anyway, but you're not going to do traditional media on a food based happy hour special. What you're going to do is essentially online outreach, so it needs to be on your website. And when you put it on your website, you need to make sure that you're using terms like happy hour special, four to six, your location things like that need to be in the website verbiage that talks about the special, because that is doing your SEO, and SEO is search engine optimization. We've talked about it some before. Really, it can get very complex. It can get very into the weeds of how the internet works. But, looking at it simply, anytime you're going to put anything on your website, think about what people may search on Google that would bring them to that information and make sure you include those words. So happy hour special, in this case, food special, after work special, buy one, get one, free food, seven under seven any of those type of terms should be included in your website where you talk about this special so that you're more likely to come up when people search for it online. But the biggest piece of external marketing to do for this or any other type of promotion is your social media. So make sure you're getting out on your channels. Make sure that it's getting posted. If you're going to do food pictures, make sure they're high quality food pictures. If you have a special menu for your food based happy hour, do a video of your chef or kitchen manager talking about the food items, talking about what makes them special, what makes them different, why people want to come in and try them. But definitely make sure you're pushing this external.

Chris Schneider: 30:04

Hey there, bar owners, it's Chris Schneider, the bar business coach. Are you tired of the daily grind and ready to skyrocket your profits? I've got the solution. With my coaching and consulting services, we deep dive into menu management, team empowerment and business optimization. Instead of slogging away in your business day in and day out, washing dishes, covering for employees and working 60 plus hours a week, picture this A thriving business that runs like clockwork, whether you're there or not, letting you enjoy the successes that you've dreamed of. Let's make it happen. Visit barbusinesscoachcom to schedule your free 30 minute strategy session with me, or you can book a session just by clicking the link in the show notes below. Together, we will turn your business into a profit powerhouse, because at the Bar Business Coach, our only goal is to help you spend less time working in your bar and more time working on your bar.

Chris Schneider: 31:00

Now, before we wrap up here, let's quickly talk about some things to avoid if you're going to do a food-based happy hour special. Number one avoid making it complicated. This food needs to be simple, food that comes out of your kitchen quick, that's easy to understand, easy to explain. Don't work on high-end, complex food for this. That's not what this is about. It's about speed and value to your customer. Even if you have a high-end restaurant Say you were doing fancy food you know really high-end and small plates and kind of a gastropub type theme Do things like croquettes.

Chris Schneider: 31:39

For those of you not familiar with croquettes, a croquette is, for all intents and purposes, a fancy tater top. Now, there are a lot of you that are probably mad at me right now for saying that, but it really is, in a lot of ways, just a fancy tater top. So find things that are still quick, still easy, that can be prepped ahead of time. You want the time it takes the food to get to the table to be almost nothing. You know we're talking five minutes here, because the idea is to get that food on the table. People eat it, they enjoy the discount. They order more booze.

Chris Schneider: 32:11

Also, don't just serve smaller versions of your normal menu items at a lower price. So what do I mean exactly by that? Let's say that you had nachos We'll go back to our nachos example on your menu at $12.50 and then during happy hour you had on your $7.00, under $7.00. You had nachos for $6.95 because that's under $7.00 and it was your normal menu nachos just in a half order. Your guests are going to feel ripped off If you're going to do a separate menu and you're not just going to discount things on your menu. You're better off picking different items, because then there's no ability for your guests to say, well, yeah, it was cheap, but I paid half price for half the food. It's not a special, you just kind of con me. So make sure you're either doing different items or you're just discounting your normal items. Don't try to give smaller portions as a way to cut your costs.

Chris Schneider: 33:10

Another thing that you absolutely want to avoid is not programming your POS system to capture all this data, whether it's doing a special set of food or it's just discounting your normal food items. You need to put all this in the POS system. You need to make sure that you're capturing 100% of the data so that you can measure whether or not this promotion is actually working, whether or not it's bringing more people in the door, what the actual effect is of the promotion on your business. And, finally, the last thing to avoid when you're doing a food happy hour special is forgetting to promote. No one knows about your promotion unless you promote it, so make sure you promote it.

Chris Schneider: 33:54

Before we wrap up here, let me just give you a few more final notes. Like I just mentioned, make sure your POS system is able to capture the data you need, but then also make sure you rely on your data to evaluate your food based specials. Use your data to do things like A-B testing of different items, and A-B testing is where you try something, say, one week, then you try something else the next week and you see which one works better. Tweak your specials constantly to improve them. We've talked about it a lot. Continuous improvement is continuous and this is a great place to test, experiment and look at continuously improving your sales based upon the value you're giving to your guests on a food based happy hour. Remember, the goal here is always hire guest check average and hire revenue than baseline. So make sure those goals are being accomplished.

Chris Schneider: 34:47

And as a final note, because I know some of you are saying right now but everybody around me does these big drink specials for happy hour, well then you probably should too. Let's be real honest here food based happy hours are a great way to generate sales and if you're in one of those states that has a bunch of restrictions on happy hour or bands happy hour, or you're in Ireland and you can't do a happy hour, or here in Indiana, where I am, where you can't do a happy hour, a food based special like what we're talking about works wonders. But if you're in an area with basically unrestricted happy hour where you're competing with four other bars and every other bar around you is doing 50% off cocktails from four to six and you try to do 50% off food from four to six but don't do anything with cocktails, it's probably not going to help your business. So while I do think there's a place for food based happy hour specials everywhere, be aware that they don't necessarily replace cocktail based happy hour specials, because if everyone else around you is doing it. If that's a expectation in your market, you're going to have to do the beverage based specials as well.

Chris Schneider: 35:55

Now, that about wraps us up for today. So if you enjoyed today's insights, make sure you like, subscribe, leave a review. If you want to gain more insights, join our bar business nation Facebook group for ongoing conversations with me and other bar owners. Also, if you want to learn more about how you can implement a food based happy hour special in your business, feel free to schedule a free coaching strategy session with me and we can explore this special but also how we can collaborate together to optimize your success as a whole. You can find links for both the Facebook group and to schedule a strategy session in the show notes below. As always, until next time, I hope you guys have a great day and we will talk again later.

Announcer: 36:37

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