Turning Restaurant, Bar, and Brewery Data into Dollars

An overview of some of the many ways restaurants, bars, and breweries can ensure they’re maximizing the potential of their data.

Don’t worry, it’s not as difficult as you might think! 😉

Just as in every other kind of business, restaurants, bars, and breweries all mainly exist to turn a profit. This requires careful consideration and close monitoring of all costs incurred and revenues generated in day-to-day operations in order to ensure efficiency.

In these industries, costs typically include labor, food, alcohol, ingredients, marketing-related expenses, rent and utilities, maintenance, equipment, permits/licenses/insurance, technology and software, etc., while revenue can come from dine-in and to-go food and beverage sales, merchandise, gift cards, consumer packaged goods, and more, all of which can be appropriately observed by analyzing data obtained through:

• POS systems (Square, Aloha, Toast, Heartland, etc.)
• Online orders (Uber Eats, DoorDash Storefront, Aloha Digital Ordering, etc.)
• Mobile applications
• Loyalty programs (GoBeep, Personica, Square Loyalty, etc.)
• Inventory tracking software (Fourth, MarketMan, Oracle NetSuite, etc.)
• Third-party insights (weather, demographics, etc.)

Types of Data

In case you’re wondering 🤔….

The kinds of information these things keep track of include all in-person, online, and app transactions from food and beverage orders, merchandise, and consumer packaged goods (like bottles of your world famous barbecue sauce, or six-packs of your latest IPA or seasonal brew 🍺). Your POS system (depending on which one you have) not only records basic orders/sales information, but it can also follow labor costs and inventory and handle more sophisticated things like scheduling, enabling kitchen production capability.

You can also keep up with all of your promotions and redemptions through loyalty programs offered by platforms like Indulj powered by GoBeep (our personal favorite 😉. Other third-party insights are responsible for monitoring things like social media interactions and mentions, as well as customer reviews.

Operational Excellence​

Why does any of this matter, you ask (or maybe you already know)….

Knowing everything that’s going on in your restaurant, bar, or brewery is imperative for maintaining operational efficiency and reducing costs as much as possible. Thoughts on turning your data into dollars:

Top Line

• Analyze your current system data to help you develop new products and/or menu items to attract your target customers and determine what your customers like most to ensure your offerings are appropriate and priced right
• Figure out which of your staff is upselling & cross-selling most so you can get them involved in improving your training program and get others to start making the same efforts

Bottom Line

• Stop selling that one entrée no one ever buys that requires 2 ingredients you don’t use for anything else!
• Reduce shrinkage by tracking down a dishonest employee by checking/comparing shift data, inventory levels, and other data points 🧐

Also, when you know exactly what kinds of food and drinks your customers want, through customer loyalty data, you can introduce them to other similar items through personalized offers based on their own individual preferences.

That said, there’s lots of opportunity in your data, that perhaps you haven’t unleashed yet.

Get Started

Okay, so what now?

All of this starts with bringing data from each and every one of the sources you’re using into one location for a single source of truth and a holistic view of your business (which is especially helpful when you have multiple locations and all kinds of information coming in from different places). With an end-to-end self-service analytics platform like (you guessed it 😉) DataLakeHouse, you can easily bring all of your data together and access advanced insights and extremely useful predictions made by machine learning algorithms that find patterns in your data. Unlike other platforms that only offer either data synchronization OR analytics, you should know that DataLakeHouse is an all in one solution that can help your restaurant, bar, or brewery business make better data-informed decisions to stay ahead of the competition and achieve more.

To learn more about DataLakeHouse and all that it can offer your restaurant, bar, or brewery, get in touch with someone from our team of analytics experts today.