Consumer confidence is improving when it comes to the UK’s eating out market. After a very torrid 2008 period confidence stabilised and is now on a gradually improving trend. The important thing to note is that the consumer is getting a lot more resilient for two reasons: job security and wealth. In terms of job security, unemployment, after an initial spike, has been relatively stable at around 2.5m. That, of course, hides a half million decline in public sector workforce and a one million increase in private sector workforce in the past two years. And the net effect of that is that you arrive at the more important statistic of 29.8m people in employment currently, which is a record. The second factor is wealth – and consumer confidence here could well be attributed to more positive media coverage around rising house prices, which always makes people a little bit more confident to go out and spend. I think the government’s ‘help to buy’ scheme will lead to a medium to long-term rise in house prices. In terms of wealth, the payday element is becoming more and more interesting. Supermarkets and late night operators are all tailoring promotions around payday. So whether a big family lunch promotion on a Saturday after payday or trading up the drink menu on a Friday night – there are big opportunities here. One of the other things I keep an eye on is the Asda Income Tracker. The latest data shows that after 11 months of rising disposable income, in the last two months (May and June) we have seen a bit of a fall. When people have less money they will have to give something up in order to eat out, so expectations from a restaurant establishment is high, which means it is still a pretty difficult backdrop for the trade. Ongoing factors such as very slow wage growth are preventing any real gains to discretionary spending power, and the squeeze on household incomes has returned in 2013. The coalition government is working on ‘cost of living’ initiatives to provide some boost to consumers. Petrol is the largest consumer expenditure after mortgage and rent costs – petrol prices have broadly stabilised but there is potentially a short term rise coming that’s worth flagging – I think we will see some fairly chunky increases. What does this mean for consumer behaviour? It can get psychologically damaging when you see the prices going up and up. And in terms of consumer behaviour – you see out of town retail parks responding better than high streets. At some point there has to be a re-balance to stop driving people out of the town centres. It means that we are adopting a more American mentality, where we visit supermarkets, cinema or ten pin bowling and a meal – all activities are done in one place, which is causing a problem for many operators out there.

We will have to wait until September until we get a better understanding of where we are. But I think we will be pleasantly surprised. I do think things are getting better – rising house prices and low mortgage rates as well as cost of living initiatives are all helping. Food is one of the major cost pressures for this sector and food cost inflation has risen ahead of cafe and restaurant price growth over the last few years. Gross margins are increasingly under pressure because of this. It’s no surprise that the independents have been forced out of the market more than the branded. The industry has done incredibly well to survive these price increases so far. National minimum wage has undoubtedly helped the industry. It has helped stimulate spending as there are more people with a disposable income. Regulation is also an issue.

Alcohol duty is still high on the agenda for the government, restaurants and food-led pubs will be affected by the Late Night Levy and I am very much against this and hygiene is also of growing importance. A consumer understanding of food standards and Scores on the Doors is growing. Convenience continues to be an important trend and it encompasses a plethora of issues. The consumer has never been more in control – they can decide how, where and when. The most obvious example in the UK is 24 hour opening of quick service restaurants. People are starting work earlier and finishing later and traveling more. Travel areas, such as trucker stops, are becoming more important in retail terms. Breakfast is increasingly eaten less at home and people are cooking less in the evenings. It’s notable that some operators are moving into convenience takeaway such as PizzaExpress and Harvester. Drinks-matching is another important trend, tapping into consumers’ interest. Byron for example, matches draft craft beers with its burgers and Fuller’s has redesigned its packaging to go on tables like wine. There is an anti ‘big brand’ trend happening in London. People don’t necessarily want to go to Pret or Eat because there is a whole next wave of artisan places. It takes years for trends to move out of London and it’s by far the most competitive market. But it’s only a market of five or six million people – and we have to remember the remaining 56 million-strong market across the rest of the country. I am cautiously optimistic. There have been lots of openings in the last three years. The economy has remained remarkably robust and eating out within that. It’s never been so dynamic and competitive but winners are easier to identify due to social media. Generally, I think we are through the worst.

At least two well-known British beer writers, Ben McFarland and Pete Brown, have declared 2013 to be the best time ever to be a beer drinker. They point to the explosion in choice, not just in sheer numbers of different brewers (and London alone has seen more than 30 new breweries open in the past four years) but in styles, range and availability. Beers that were once obscurities limited to little-known parts are now on the lips of aficionados – the smoky, bitter Grodziskie from Poland, for example, or the sour Gose, from Leipzig. (And if you’ve still not heard of either, don’t worry, you will soon.) Alongside these are beers never before seen on the planet: “double IPAs”, and even “triple IPAs”, rammed full of American hops, with overwhelming floral and fruity aromas; cask-aged beers, designed to pick up flavours from whatever was inside the cask, giving stouts matured in old whisky barrels, for example; beers brewed entirely with obscure and unusual yeasts; beers made with coffee, with unusual herbs, with new varieties of hops; beers made to recipes 150 years old or more, using ingredients (such as malts prepared in particular now obsolete ways) that have had to be reinvented. A whole new style of outlet has arrived, the craft beer bar, staffed and patronised by people in their 30s, selling not just “real ales”, but the type of beer best described for a UK audience as “craft keg”.

“Craft keg” beers would be “mainstream” craft beers (if that’s not an oxymoron) in the United States, from brewers such as Stone, Rogue and Sierra Nevada, but are rejected by the Campaign for Real Ale for being served under pressure, rather than from the cask. However, these beers, full of flavour, very different from the much-hated keg brands of the past, such as Watney’s Red Barrel and Ind Coope Double Diamond, rarely suffering from the quality and handling problems that dog traditional British cask beer, or “real ale”, are increasingly popular among a particular demographic in Britain, and increasingly being brewed by British “craft beer” brewers who previously would have stuck strictly to traditional cask ales.

But while this is great for beer drinkers (and beer writers, who have a constantly changing and evolving market to write about, and an audience thirsty for information on the latest developments in the world of beer) it’s not so great for retailers. You knew where you were once, running a pub: you accepted (assuming you were a tied house) what the brewery sent you (a mild, a bitter, bottled brown ale and stout and, as the 1960s rolled on into the 1970s and trousers flared while hair grew long, one of those new “lagers” they suddenly seemed so keen to push), and your customers accepted what you sold. Nobody demanded a Belgian gueuze or a Bavarian wheat beer, and if they had you’d simply have barred them, which would have settled their hash straight away.

Even in the 1990s and the early years of the current century, it was still relatively simple for someone running a pub: you ordered the best-selling lager and bitter from your pubco, or maybe the second best-selling if you wanted to compete on price, topped the bar-top offer up with Guinness and perused the offers from Brake Brothers. If you felt up to it, you might include a cask ale for the small minority who liked that sort of thing. But gradually you found that the pressure to widen the offer, to compete with the pub down the road that had more unusual lagers, and a regularly changing line-up of cask ales, both local and from far away, was causing increasing problems.

Today the old verities are changing: once the men and women who ran pubs could be certain that the Italian restaurant two doors along, or the French bistro at the end of the road, might serve better food than they could manage from their kitchens but no foreign restaurant would ever compete with any pub over their beer selection. Now, however, importers are able to offer a range of boutique beers from France and Italy that rival, in their variety and quality, anything the British or Americans can do. Meanwhile the “craft beer bar”, a trend that started in the provinces and only properly reached London around 2010, is offering a range of different draught and bottled beers never seen before together on British bar tops. Sure, they only attract a minority of the beer drinking public, and at the prices they generally charge this isn’t too surprising. But can the ordinary British pub afford to completely ignore the trends that have made this the best time ever to be a beer drinker?

Mintel recently put out figures showing that in the United States, “craft beer” – which, admittedly, means something different in the US to what it does in the UK, indeed, you’ll find it hard to get any two British beer commentators even to agree on what the phrase “craft beer” means – anyway, craft beer in the US appeals to 49% of “Millennials”, that is, people born in the 1980s and early 1990s and now aged 33 to 21, and 40% of “Generation Xers”, that is, people born in the late 1960s and 1970s and now aged 49 to 34. If those figures translate at all into the UK market, they should frighten the big brewers to their white wellington boots, and cause some very hard thinking among British beer retailers. Here’s the magazine Marketing Week:

“Volume sales have fallen for the eighth year in a row in the UK, with 381 million fewer pints drunk in 2012, according to the British Beer and Pub Association. By contrast, over 2,000 of the country’s pubs and clubs have added a craft beer to their stocklists over the past year and supermarkets are offering increased shelf space, according to CGA Strategy. Sales of boutique beers such as Blue Moon and Doom Bar are set to grow 43% by 2015, the insight firm adds.”