Raising the bar on drink promotions: industry specialists explore new methods of marketing profitable beverage programs with special offers and expanded menu options

Nation's Restaurant News, July 23, 2007

They might not be inspired by run-of-the-mill lemonade, but "how about pomegranate lemonade?" he suggested. "How about flavored iced tea? How about flavored Sprite?

"You need to present options to people because it's too easy for [customers who aren't drinking alcohol] to say: 'No thanks. I'll just have water with lemon,'" he continued. "We've got to eliminate that. The way to do that, I think, is to present options to them."

Miliotes of Seasons 52 suggested that sampling beverages other than wine would likely work well.

He said selling wine by the glass removed diners' intimidation at ordering a whole bottle of wine, and it also made it easier to give guests tastes of wine because servers don't have to open a bottle to do it.

"If they don't like [the wine], you've just gotten goodwill because you were a good guy that allowed them to try," he said. "What keeps us from doing that with any other thing that's liquid? Nothing except our laziness or our fear of losing money on it."

He added that restaurateurs also are hesitant to offer more wines by the glass for fear of losing it to spoilage. But the resulting increase in wine sales far outstrips the amount of wine that goes bad.

Mitchell of Sodexho said he saw a place in the market for nonalcoholic drinks that were just as interesting and cool-looking as cocktails.

"I think it goes back to the glass," Pae of Olive Garden said. "One thing we learned about a year and a half ago was the glass that we were serving our nonalcoholic drinks in felt very boring and unspecial. So people who weren't drinking alcohol, for whatever reason, chose not to even drink because we were giving them an ugly glass when everybody [who's drinking alcohol is] getting these fancy martini glasses. We changed our glasses to make it feel more special and more unique," and that had a positive impact on sales, she said.

Monroe of Coca-Cola said T.G.I. Friday's tested nonalcoholic beverages by starting them on the kids' menu.

"They started their whole slushy program with their kids' menu," she said.

She said Texas Dairy Queen also was launching new flavors in an attempt to follow Sonic's model of offering a wide array of flavorings that can be added to soft drinks. But she observed that such programs require systemwide commitment.

"You make a conscious decision this is something you want to do, you get your system behind it and you can make a lot more progress," she said.

The topic of energy drinks, with and without vodka added to them, also came up. Johnson said Champps left it up to their individual restaurants' directors of operations to decide whether to offer energy drink cocktails.

"Of our 49 restaurants, 47 of them offer it and sell it on a regular basis," he said.

"Who are you selling them to, your employees?" Pae asked. "We didn't sell one to a guest."

Mitchell said that, although energy drinks are thought of as appealing to people below working age, they are "becoming a huge category" at Sodexho.

"It just keeps growing and growing and growing, and people are often replacing their coffee in the morning with a can of Rockstar or whatever," he said.