Recovery of the Food & Beverage Industry

Following on from the worldwide pandemic, industries are beginning to get back on track and revert to the ‘new normal’ in order to survive. With the Eat Out to Help Out government scheme creating a boom in the food and beverage industry, businesses within hospitality have been required to rapidly adapt and prepare, following their closure for the previous five months.

With the expected and anticipated boom in visitors to pubs, restaurants and bars over the weekend and between Monday to Wednesday, the hospitality industry has received a dramatic push to keep up and maintain stock levels in order to meet consumer demands.

This recovery of the food and beverage industry has been a major milestone in the beginning of the UK economy getting back on track. As a same-day courier service supporting a wide range of sectors, including food and beverage, we have supported the hospitality industry through the movement of their goods to ensure that the industry can fully provide for its customers.

The Slow Decline

With hospitality making up the fourth-largest industry in the UK, this accounts for around 9% of the UK workforce. With this in mind, the UK economy has suffered, entering into a recession to keep many workers in employment through the government’s furlough scheme.

According to Statista, sales in pubs and restaurants fell following the Government’s announcement to begin social distancing and avoid large public groups on the 16th March. Restaurant groups experienced their biggest decline in customers and sales, with an average drop of 21% in restaurant sales, a 14% drop in bar sales and a smaller 12% drop in pub sales.

With the hospitality industry beginning to feel the pressure to survive, the forced closure led to a sales drop of 60% for bars and a 56.4% drop in sales for restaurants in March.

The Recovery of Hospitality

While the “stay at home” message began to ease in June, pubs, restaurants and bars throughout the UK were given the go-ahead to reopen in the early days of July. Although pubs and bars received a ‘mini-boom’ following their reopening, restaurants began to suffer as the furlough scheme and redundancy shadowed the nation. According to The Guardian, those pubs in the UK that did decide to reopen were reporting back a 45% drop in sales during the first week of reopening in comparison to pre-COVID levels.

The Eat Out to Help Out scheme was then introduced to encourage the UK to ‘get outside’ and support local businesses within the hospitality industry with the public enjoying 50% off their meals on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. Brits eager for a bargain have taken up the Government’s ‘Eat Out to Help Out’ offer and embraced cheaper eating.

This scheme helped kickstart the recovery of the food and beverage industry, with over 83,000 restaurants and pubs in the UK signing up for the scheme. This resulted in 10,540,394 individual meals claimed in just the first week of the scheme. 

According to the House of Commons Library, restaurants had claimed back £336.0 million from the Government in the first three weeks of the scheme which accounted for an average figure of £5.25 per meal.

Meeting Demand

With this scheme creating a boom in the hospitality industry and encouraging more members of the public to support local businesses; restaurants, hotels, pubs and bars have needed to ensure that demand can be met by having enough stock to cater to demand. With more diners in restaurants and pubs beginning to reach full capacity, these businesses require a faster method of having stock delivered to their premises on time.

With this in mind, the hospitality industry has relied heavily on a same-day courier service who specialise in delivering to the food and beverage industry to ensure that restaurants, pubs and bars are stocked and can take full advantage of the Government scheme.

Since the reopening of this industry, we have supported the fast movement of barrel and keg deliveries to many venues across the UK. We have collected and delivered consignments using our fleet of vans so that we can reach any town, city or village destination quickly.

Food & Beverage Fulfillment 

As the hospitality industry began to recover, food and drink subscription services were also seen to be on the rise. It has been reported that food and meal subscription services are the second most popular subscription service on the market, with the average household now spending up to £552 a year on sign-up services. 

This growth put food and drink logistics services under pressure to meet growing demands of this sector. Throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, we continued to increase our driver numbers to ensure we had the driver resource to meet current and future demand, meaning we have couriers available to ensure food and drink is always delivered to businesses fresh and on-time.

Are You Ready for the Surge?

Whether its kegs & barrels, bottles & cans or cases of specialised craft ales or ciders, we can support you to ensure that customer demand is met whatever your UK location. Our team of experienced and trained couriers collect and deliver to suit the exact requirements of your business and its customers. Using our same-day courier service, we can ensure your consignment arrives just in time as part of a scheduled or ad hoc delivery service.

We handle supplier collection and deliveries any day of the week, at any time, so you can trust us when we promise your consignment will arrive on time, every time. If you’d like to find out more about our retail courier service, please get in touch with us.