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Where Craft Beer is Losing On Restaurant Menus

Top 2014 Beer Trends for Restaurants

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It’s undeniable that the craft beer industry is booming–but how about your restaurant? Your diners may ​now search out restaurants based on the number of craft brews they carry, and if your menu carries a large variety of brews on tap, you’ve probably been dominating the scene. However, with so many brews now ​available at the local liquor store, your​ restaurant can no longer survive just by playing a ​numbers game. You need a strategy, and that starts with identifying and capitalizing on the ​latest beer trends. Here are the top beer trends you need to know about to keep your sales strong in the competitive holiday season.

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How to Choose an iPad Wine Menu Solution for Your Restaurant

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By now you’re hearing about iPad wine lists or iPad drink menus popping up at restaurants around the world.  There’s a large number of solutions out there to choose from and finding the right solution for your restaurant can be difficult.  Here I’ve broken down some of the top considerations for you to think about when evaluating tablet menus for your restaurant. Read more

Selling Wine Every Day Uncorkd

Start Selling Wine Every Day

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On the surface, selling wine seems easy. Your guests come into your restaurant ready to spend money and have a great night, but somehow, when their server gets to the table, your guests choose not to order wine, opting instead for something flashy, like a cocktail; sturdy, like a beer; or choosing the conservative route and going with a non-alcoholic drink. As a restaurant owner or manager, this situation can get stressful because you didn’t allocate funds to stock a lovely looking wine cellar, you planned on selling every last drop of the wine you ordered. But you can’t do that unless every one of your tables sees wine as a necessary complement to their meal—not as an added expense meant for special occasions. Here’s how to convince your guests that at your restaurant, wine is an everyday thing. Read more

iPad Wine Menus, More Affordable Than You Think

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iPad wine menus are popping up across the country.  But it isn’t only celebrity chefs using the technology.  Although you can find iPad beverage menus at Gordon Ramsay’s or André Rochat’s restaurants, restaurants of all sizes across the country are using electronic wine menus, from independent operators to regional and corporate operators nationwide.

One of the hesitations we usually hear from prospective customers is around cost.  Having all of these iPads must be so expensive.  After all, using paper is cheap, pennies.  Let’s break down the costs a little further… Read more

What Restaurants Can Learn from Olive Garden to Improve Alcoholic Beverage Sales

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The last few days has seen quite a bit of news about Olive Garden and their parent company, Darden.  Starboard Value, a hedge fund that is one of the largest shareholders of the public company, has recently put forward a slate of 12 new board prospects to replace the entire board of Darden.  Now, Starboard has released a 300 slide deck blasting the inefficiencies they see with Olive Garden and other concepts like Longhorn Steakhouse, while outlining turnaround steps they would take to get the brands on the right track.  According to Starboard, Olive Garden is missing out on $56 million in annual earnings by not taking basic steps with their beverage program.

If you are in the hospitality industry, I highly recommend taking a look at Starboard’s analysis and proposal for yourself.  But after spending hours reading through their materials, I’m going to highlight several things called out in the report that all restaurants should be focused on to improve the guest experience and bottom line.  While there are a lot of problems identified and solutions proposed in the report, I’m going to focus on alcoholic beverages based on our experience at Uncorkd and provide information on how to improve your beverage sales. Read more

The Newest Alcohol Finds for Your Fall Drink Menu

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Do you want to add something a little unexpected to your fall drinks menu? A recent article in the New York Times, “Culinary Trends in New York” described all the new, exciting innovations that I did not see coming in the predictions I made for 2014, and they sound delicious. Try adding these three alcohol trends to your drinks menu to spice up the season.

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How to upsell wine in a restaurant with staff incentives

Increase Restaurant Wine Sales through Staff Incentives

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Upselling, cross-selling, and other high-level sales techniques, when balanced on a strong wine knowledge foundation, form the backbone of your restaurant wine sales. This is good news, as it means that the power to increase sales rests only on your willingness to educate your staff. In addition, when you do motivate and educate your wait staff, they are likely to go to great lengths to assure your wine list’s sales success. Uncorkd has published many articles in the past that help you to teach your staff about wine, sake, scotch, beer, absinthe, and other alcohols; today’s post focuses on two strategies—a simple one and a complex one—that you can use to motivate your servers. Read more

Why Uncorkd is the Best iPad Wine List Platform

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iPad wine and beverage menus are becoming more and more popular as restaurants learn about the benefits of the technology.  Not only do the digital menus provide a significant ROI by increasing sales, they also provide a number of other benefits, from improved staff training to saving time updating menus.

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increase drink sales with a picture uncorkd

How to Increase Your Drink Sales without Saying a Word

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A lot of my tips revolve around training your servers or bartenders to memorize information and repeat it back when needed, or to ask key questions at opportune moments. Sometimes though, words just get to be too much. Here’s a tip to increase your drink sales without having to say a single word. Read more

law of reciprocity for wine sales

Sell more wine. It’s the law.

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Okay, okay. It’s not illegal to have bad wine sales, it’s just a darn shame. However, today’s post offers a method for using a law of psychology to sell more wine. Get ready to learn all about the Law of Reciprocity.

What’s the Law of Reciprocity?

This psychological law states that when you give people something, or you do a favor for them, they are much, much more likely to return the favor. Apparently, this human behavior is a throwback from our prehistoric days, but it affects us all the time in the modern world. Don’t believe me? Here’s an example of this law, using something you’ve probably experienced recently.

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