One of the factors increasing the likelihood of a stadium or arena successfully shifting to an all-inclusive food and beverage model for every ticketholder is the industry’s capability to predict consumption.
Levy Chief Commercial Officer Sandeep Satish worked closely with the 49ers on their rollout of the Member Inclusive Menu, an all-inclusive benefit for the team’s roughly 44,000 season ticketholders.
“At the 49ers, we’re almost down to the item level at this point,” Satish told SBJ’s Bret McCormick in his magazine story examining the all-inclusive-for-all concept. “We know exactly what we’ll sell, what people will consume, when they’ll do it, and we can project it to a T.”
Predicting consumption at one-off events can still be tricky for food and beverage providers — see the MLB Speedway Classic last summer — but the stadium and arena settings are considerably more predictable.
“Food waste isn’t something that I lie awake at night, worrying that we’re overproducing and under consuming,” Aramark Sports + Entertainment president and CEO Alison Birdwell said.
Aramark is using real-time AI to push messages to a venue manager’s phone saying, “you should probably stop cooking in this stand at 8:10pm, because we know X, Y, Z is going to happen,” Birdwell noted.
The industry knows that weekend per-caps are lower because fans eat at home before games, or that per-caps for a certain concert tour will be similar in different markets. The fans are the same even if the markets differ. When F&B consultant Jonathan Harris was working with the Marlins to launch a dollar hot dog night, the consumption information he gathered from multiple sources proved spot-on.
“The more I’m in this business, the more I’m fascinated by guest behavior and how consistent it is,” he said.
