“Sloppy Giuseppe” became a regular at my dinner table when I moved to London in 2001. Reassuringly PizzaExpress branded, it stood out among the other ready-made pizzas in my local Sainsbury’s and is one of the first grocer-restaurant collaborations I remember as a consumer. With revenue of these retail products exceeding £100m last year, according to the latest Propel update, and with the launch of a new pod concept in Tesco, PizzaExpress cements its leading position in the contested overlap between restaurants and supermarkets.

 

The past decade saw supermarket food sales come under pressure from an expanding casual food sector and the ease of ordering online. Consumer preferences and habits changed, with the average person in the UK spending less and less time in the kitchen – and money on groceries. Instead, we started to eat out several times a week, turning it from an occasion to an everyday occurrence, or order in, maybe, to be eaten alongside the latest Netflix hit.

 

The restaurant sector – in its many forms – was the winner, particularly casual and fast casual dining. Then came covid, and now come the grocers who increasingly seem to have got their act together. In Think Hospitality, we support leadership teams address strategic food and beverage opportunities and challenges. Our clients are restaurant groups, hotels, retailers and investors across the UK, Europe and the Middle East. And we increasingly see supermarket action on the agenda.

 

While supermarkets and super tankers aren’t nimble, they have tremendous momentum once they turn, and many supermarkets have now decided to do something about their loss of “share of wallet”. Remember, the whole food sector is enormously competitive, and even subtle shifts in consumer spending have severe consequences for a supermarket’s business model, so it comes as no surprise that this has been high on big retailers’ strategic agenda over the past few years. One can only imagine the sums spent on projects with Boston Consulting Group, or my dear old colleagues at McKinsey.

 

As the magazine Forbes wrote recently: “Over the past year, UK retailers have exhibited an unparalleled appetite for innovation to compete with restaurants, hospitality venues and specialised food service operators.” And, we could add, against meal box concepts such as Gousto that briefly flourished during lockdown.

 

The counter offensive has several battle fronts:

 

• Supermarkets and, increasingly, convenience stores move aggressively to capture the UK lunch trade with their meal deals – often priced to act as loss leaders to entice shoppers to buy higher margin items along with their lunch. Choosing an alternative is now increasingly seen as a treat for many people and only fast-food outlets can match the perceived “value” of a meal deal.

 

• Supermarkets are also rearranging their core offer and closing down fresh food counters such as butchers and fish mongers, often replacing them with shop-in-shop to-go offers. KelliDeli, for instance, has flown under the radar even of many food and beverage insiders to become Europe’s largest sushi brand, with close to 1,000 outlets in supermarkets across Europe. The sushi is hand-made on site and the stores are mostly operated by independent franchisees with entrepreneurial energy, under strict franchisor supervision and leveraging the company’s purchasing power in the crucial salmon trade.

 

• We see a general lift in the quality of ready meals and restaurant-quality frozen food – often in collaborations with restaurant brands who, prior to covid lockdowns, would probably not have gone down this route. Hawksmoor and Ocado is one example, while Iceland and Sainsbury’s with TGI Fridays and Greggs are others – showing that grocer-restaurant tie-ins can work across the price range. Restaurant-branded condiments and sauces promise to pep up homecooked meals; and branded bread (like Gail’s in Waitrose) peps up the grocer’s foodie credentials. M&S’ Gastro Pub range is another example, tying the value proposition.  

 

• Several supermarkets in Denmark have started to utilise their excess “free” space and convenient location to build dark kitchens and compete in the delivery game without risking their own brands in the process.

 

What happens next is the supermarkets getting down to the nitty-gritty of optimisation: getting the pricing, promotions and portfolio right. All those small tactical measures that large corporates are so good at with their vast amounts of data and armies of analysts. Tesco launched 155 novel food-to-go items in 2023, according to the Forbes article, and Waitrose underwent a comprehensive revamp of its food-to-go offerings, bolstered by the introduction of a £5 lunchtime meal deal that is said to have tripled sandwich sales. In other words, expect more aggressive innovation from the supermarkets in the years to come.

 

So, what does this mean for restaurateurs? In our view, depending on the market and circumstances, there are both offensive and defensive measures to be considered. The defensive tactics come down to the heart of hospitality. There needs to be good and compelling reasons for people to choose restaurant (including delivery) over grocer. Now is probably a good time to give your brand or group a thorough MOT to find out where and how the offer can be improved. We see a lot of inertia in tweaking concepts, optimising price points, engineering menus and upping staff training to really deliver on that “human experience” factor.

 

And maybe you should go on the offense. You won’t stem the tide, so why not ride the wave? If we are right that food retailers are only just getting started, there will continue to be a number of opportunities for restaurant brands to collaborate with grocers for shelf space or even outlet space. There are many examples of this, such as the renowned restaurateur Asma Khan’s restaurant Darjeeling Express partnering with Ocado.

 

This is not an easy way out, though. Getting products listed, then sold on a recurring basis and scaling up production if things go well (while earning a margin in the process) all pose challenges that even dedicated consumer goods companies struggle to overcome. But remember, branded products don’t need to be on the shelves in Tesco nationwide to add value – being found in local grocers, delis and specialty shops (if one’s business is local) can help cement a strong local position. My partner in Think Hospitality, James Hacon, explored this topic in more detail in “Restaurant diversification strategies – moving into retail” in May 2023, which you can find on our website.

 

For people wanting to explore this route, we recommend treating it as a proper new venture and getting someone on board who knows this game, either as an advisory board or a dedicated team or person. It takes commitment and investment. There are also companies out there worth talking to, like Young Foodies, specialising in helping small but promising brands navigate the vast and stormy sea of grocery retail.

 

Another strategic option that an increasing number of brands explore – not just celebrity chefs and nationwide brands – is international expansion. One benefit of operating in a highly competitive market like the UK is that the core business side is often stronger than what is found in many other markets. Concepts and operations are generally sharper, and technology more widely adopted. This may not be enough – or be the right route for your brand – but it is an option worth exploring. We are working with a number of brands and restaurateurs to develop formats that will work internationally, developing road maps for going abroad and finding the right local partners to ensure proper win-win relationships.

 

In any case, most foodservice chief executives would do well to develop a good, hard and fact-based perspective on their strategic options for when their lunch is about to be eaten by a more aggressive supermarket sector (pun somewhat intended). They may be going for more than just the lunch.  

Pub crawls are now a topic of serious academic study. It may not be immediately obvious that this is a good thing. Boffins focusing their microscopes on ordinary people enjoying themselves might feel intrusive. And doesn’t it rather take the fun out of the thing? After all, we’re trying to escape work, not be somebody’s work.

 

Nevertheless, I was quite excited when professor Victoria Wells from the University of York stepped up at a Drinking Studies Network conference last week to talk about her, to my mind, long overdue study of pub crawling. When you think about it, it’s just one aspect of how real, live people use hospitality, and surely that’s of interest to the industry?

 

It’s at an early stage, but Wells has already begun to construct a taxonomy of pub crawls that begins by dividing them into “organised” and “unorganised” and then splitting them into different types. The resulting chart was already looking quite complicated, yet I couldn’t help complicating it further as I began to realise what a big subject she’s taken on.

 

I’ve organised a lot of pub crawls myself. And beer walks, which I’d classify separately as largely rural with longer distances between the pubs. At one point, the urban crawls grew large enough to attract the attention of the local constabulary, who kept watch on us from a distance.

 

Though we were well-behaved, disorder is a particular concern around pub crawls over a certain size. To minimise the risk, I’m careful about how I pace the day and make sure there are opportunities for food. There is a strict itinerary that only once went seriously awry when we reached the second pub, and the rain was so heavy nobody would leave.

 

It helps that I know everyone on the crawl. Apart from that time a friend-of-a-friend turned up, sank a pint of 9% cider at the first pub, got quite raucous at the second, then thankfully disappeared.

 

A different type of pub crawl that has attracted the wrong kind of attention is what I’d call “circuit drinking” – moving around a group of city centre bars. Such occasions were the focus of media attention a couple of decades ago in the debates around “binge-drinking”.

 

Part of the problem is these events are so visible, involving large numbers concentrated within a small area. Camera crews were irresistibly drawn to the spectacle, mock-shocked at the sight of scantily clad young women behaving badly.

 

It threw the industry on the defensive, and managing the big night out is surely a special challenge that operators have since addressed through working more closely with the authorities.

 

More recently, a new type of pub crawl has emerged – the “beer mile”. It’s a craft beer thing, and therefore “serious”. People who embark on a beer mile are moving from taproom to bar, often in and out of a series of railway arches, in a journey of discovery and improving their beer knowledge.

 

Yet, from a certain perspective, they’re not doing anything much different to those on a city or town circuit. Wearing more clothes, perhaps, and crucially, drinking interesting beer rather than shots. It’s perceived as more respectable, though there are worries that the original Bermondsey Beer Mile has lately attracted the wrong sort of crowd. It’s really a matter of class, of course.

 

At the other end of the scale, there are low-tempo crawls. It’s very hard to get drunk on a beer walk, for instance. I’ve tried, but there’s too much exercise involved. You just get tired. Then there’s the “ticker”, picking off pubs listed in the Good Beer Guide, for instance, over a period of months or even years. 

 

They’re a close relative of the new species of pub blogger. Scott Spencer, of Micropub Adventures, is a good example. He’s on a mission to visit towns all over country, calling in on beer-led pubs and bars and brewery taprooms. His work – if you can call it work, and I do – is building into a useful guide.

 

Finally, my co-author will probably kill me if I don’t mention our own project, British Beer Breaks, which aims to put a new spin on the pub crawl by combining beer drinking in a variety of venues over a few days with other things to see and do on your visit. The idea is that by the end of your trip, you’re feeling slightly more educated and not just hungover.

 

What all this great family of pub crawls have in common is that they get people out and about, socialising, exploring and adding a perhaps under-appreciated bonus for pubs and bars. As the diligent academic will invariably conclude: more research is needed.