On-premise beer volumes held improvements in latest four weeks

GuestMetrics gathers awesome beverage data from point-of-sales (POS) systems from restaurants and bars across the United States, and for this we are thankful. What do they have to say about the last four weeks? While GuestMetrics had thought the improvement in on-premise beer trends in July was driven mainly by the World Cup, it was encouraged to see that trends remained steady at down 2.2 percent during the four week period ending 8/10. During the first half of 2014 on-premise beer volumes were down 3.8 percent. Fun facts:

• While Premium Light continues to lose share, largely at the hands of Craft, Premium Light appears to be taking back some momentum from Craft during the last eight weeks.
• Premium Light share was down 1.7 percent (vs. down 2 percent YTD) while Craft share was up 1.8 percent (vs. up 2.3 percent in Q1 and up 2 percent YTD). Import share was down 0.4 percent.
• IPA share was up 1.5 percent, Cider was up 0.5 percent and FMB/flavors were up 0.1 percent. Pale Lager share was down 2.4 percent.
• In the latest four weeks beer volume in bars was down 2.4 percent (giving up some of the World Cup lift of down only 0.9 percent last month), casual dining was down 2.9 percent (an improvement driven by improved traffic trends), Lodging volume was up 3.1 percent and Fine Dining was up 2.9 percent.

GuestMetrics reported that overall on-premise traffic growth was a positive 0.3 percent in the latest four weeks, significantly better than the down 1.2 percent YTD as consumer confidence hits post crisis highs, although with the gap widening between high and low income consumers, we aren’t out of the woods yet, but the improved traffic trends if sustained are encouraging.

So you know: GuestMetrics collects check-level data from over ten thousand locations closely representative of the broad on-premise sector across geographies, and with respect to the make-up of casual dining, bars/clubs, fine dining and lodging. GuestMetrics turns billions of raw transactions into intelligible information that is transforming the business operations of everyone from the independently-owned bar/restaurant on the corner, to multi-national chains, to the food and beverage companies that supply them.