Customers look for pubs to provide more 'food occasions'

The Future of Pubs 2014​ research, compiled for last week's Future Pub Conference, run by the PMA​ and M&C Report​, also highlighted a significant difference between what customers and publicans think will be the key food trends over the next 12 months.

The research found that 30% of 25 to 44 year-olds, the group most likely to have young children, would visit pubs more often if they were more child and mother-friendly.

Many publicans are aware of this trend, with 35% of the 150 surveyed at random believing that making pubs more child and mother-friendly would drive more midweek sales.

Him! also highlighted research that found 33% of customers would not return to pub where they had been served a bad cup of coffee.

Ed Sibley, senior client manager at him!, stressed the importance of a great coffee offer, combined with meal occasions at different times of day, if pubs are to look “outside the core customers base to families and mothers with kids”.

Trends​

The him! study found that a similar proportion of publicans and customers predicted that locally source food would be a big trend in the next 12 months (45% and 49%).

However, Sibley highlighted the gap that exists between expectations around the importance of trends such as homemade (33% for publicans against 50% for customers), British (21% against 47%), fresh (11% against 47%), healthy (9% against 38%), organic (1% against 17%) and premium (9% against 18%).

Sibley said: “There’s plenty of opportunity to move beyond the locally sourced message into other quite defined messaging.”

Meanwhile, 32% of pub operators said they would focus on improving their food offer in the next year.