By Christine Landry
After a grueling year-and-a-half of huge ups and downs for many restaurants due to COVID-19, Americans are keen—some downright ecstatic—to leave the house and finally enjoy meals out again. Yet this poses different restaurant challenges than the pandemic did. Not only do restaurants have to cater to customers who want more from a night out thanks to prolonged minimal-social-life measures, but restaurants must do this with smaller staffs, another pandemic-induced challenge. It begs the question: How do restaurants provide more value with less assistance?
To help, we’ve identified three modern restaurant woes and one excellent, all-encompassing solution!
Restaurant Woe 1: Restaurants must save the earth while serving drinks.
Eco-conscious practices are having a moment, and like non-compostable trash, this isn’t going away any time soon. And for good reason. With takeout’s uptick due to social-distancing measures, we rely on plastic to-go materials more than ever. In fact, the International Solid Waste Association estimates that single-use plastic consumption has increased by 250-300% during the pandemic.
Thankfully, consumers want to correct this behavior. According to our research, sustainability is very important to nearly eight in ten survey respondents. That means sustainability should be important to restaurants too.
Good Gracious! can help. Our draft organic beverages offer a unique low-plastic product that leaves less eco-conscious competitors in the dust. As a dispensed beverage, Good Gracious! reduces packaging by up 80% compared to ready-to-drink competitors, plus we use recyclable or reusable packaging whenever possible.
Not only that, Good Gracious! requires 70% less energy to distribute than refrigerated items, and 5-7 times fewer road miles than other products to deliver. To top it off, Good Gracious! sources organic ingredients grown without harmful pesticides and fertilizers. It makes for a beverage that both you and your customers can feel good about.
Restaurant Woe 2: Everyone wants options. Lots of them.
When you go to Starbucks, Peet’s, or your local coffee shop, you can order coffee any which way you want. Your go-to order might be a half-caf iced cappuccino with oat milk while the customer behind you prefers a lavender latte with a CBD infusion. Not long ago we simply ordered coffee—good old, American drip—because we had few other options. Then Starbucks came along and changed the entire coffee game.
And thank goodness for that because who wants to go back to the coffee equivalent of cavemen times? (Answer: no one.) Coffee options are here to stay, and this has created a desire for customization in all things. The pandemic further upped the options ante by allowing us to enjoy our favorite restaurant meals and beverages at home. Now we can eat restaurant-quality food without worrying about contagions, tipping, or wearing real clothes. So if restaurants want to lure back customers as the world fully opens again, they need to provide options worth forgoing the comforts of home.
But the post-pandemic news isn’t all dire, to say the least. As of December 2021, on-premise beverage sales have been up for 24 consecutive weeks above 2019 levels. Bacardi 2021 Cocktail Trends Report notes customers are coming out of the pandemic more adventurous. So consumers have a desire to venture out—they just need a good enough reason. “According to bartenders, almost two in five consumers are interested in classic cocktails with a twist.” The twist is key. So a whiskey sour may not thrill diners, while a chili-infused version may pique their interest, according to Bacardi, because you’re offering a drink experience they can’t easily create at home.
Customers’ preferences are well and good, but offering more, more, more creates scalability issues for restaurants. Innovative drinks don’t grow on trees—even if their ingredients do. Good Gracious!, again, offers a solution suited for both restaurants and customers. It starts with an alcohol base that can be customized as 0%, 4%, or 10% ABV for spirit-free, lightly spirited, or highly spirited drinks. Next comes various flavor options, such as strawberry lemonade, berry hibiscus, and mandarin stone fruit. All of this is done with a touch of a button.
It’s Starbucks-level customization for spirited or spirit-free cocktails, which gives customers the options they crave without creating extra work for your staff. Who doesn’t want that?
Restaurant Woe 3: Diners want it all — delicious yet lower calorie beverages.
To top off our list of woes, general beverage options aren’t enough. A restaurant must have certain types of options, among them, lower calorie drinks. Many of us took a break from calorie counting while on lockdown and, perhaps, gained some pandemic pounds. Now that we’re back out in public, we’ve become more calorie-conscious again. So diners want to dine out without packing on additional pounds. In fact, our research reveals 4 consumers in 10 prioritize eating healthy since the pandemic, and 77% are trying to limit or avoid sugar.
You see evidence of the shift to “skinny” drink options in hard seltzers touting a calorie count of 100 or less. Many of these deliver on the alcohol content we want yet not on flavor. Hard seltzers may taste like anything from super-sweet Jolly Ranchers to canned liquid sadness.
The hard seltzer trend has made its way to restaurant menus too, yet it’s hard to entice customers with an offering they can easily get themselves for less at Target. Enter Good Gracious! draft beverages, which customers can’t buy as a six-pack at the grocery store. The inability to get the drink elsewhere along with its fresh, flavorful ingredients and high-customization quotient ups its appeal. These factors make it worth spending money on because you can’t get it just anywhere. Add to that, its lower sugar and calorie count compared to most beers and sodas, and health-aware consumers can leave the guilt at home.
The Ultimate Win-Win
A product rarely serves both seller and purchaser equally, and yet Good Gracious! does just that. It diversifies your restaurant’s drink menu while streamlining the bar work. For customers, it offers a night-on-the-town-worthy drink: customizable, lower calorie, flavor-forward, and earth-friendly.
Everyone will want more.
