This week's Weekly Briefing Report takes aim at two numbers the sector tends to accept without much argument. The first asks whether the eating-out market is really growing - or simply redistributing a fixed pool of demand among operators and the suppliers who serve them, which changes what ‘winning’ actually means. The second explains why GVA makes hospitality look low-value and low-productivity, and why that verdict says far more about the metric than about the businesses i

Two narratives are shaping foodservice strategy right now and I take a closer look in this week’s issue. The first is the rise of singles as a driver of out-of-home growth. The headline figures are real - but when you dig into the underlying demographic data, the picture is more complicated and the implications for where to focus are quite different from what most commentary suggests. The second is the idea that value-led operators are the safe bet in a squeezed market. Som

The headlines tell one story - 305 net pub and restaurant closures in Q1 2026, casual dining down nearly 1% in a single quarter. But the full picture is more complicated, and arguably more interesting. This week’s Briefing digs into who is actually winning in the current market (it’s not who you’d expect), why FIFA’s World Cup pricing scandal has something important to say about the future of hospitality revenue management, and whether the sector can get ahead of a customer r

The King's Speech reached further into hospitality than most people thought but the levers that actually decide whether the sector makes money are conspicuously absent. From the Overnight Visitor Levy's predicted 33,000 job losses to a rare piece of genuinely useful supply-side help on food costs, this week's analysis cuts through the legislative noise to tell you what it really means for operators. I have just returned from the US where I spent a week observing the restaur

The latest Low Pay Commission report suggests the April 2026 National Living Wage increase will have only a negligible impact on the wider economy. Yet beneath those reassuring headlines sits a more uncomfortable reality: hospitality is shedding jobs, investment is stalling and operators are being asked to absorb rising labour costs at the same moment consumers have normalised cutting back. The report may be correct on its own terms, but what happens when policy is viewed cum

There’s a small detail in the Ole & Steen move into Ocado that’s easy to miss. Its signature Cinnamon Social is now a café treat, a delivery order and a supermarket item. Same product, three occasions. That’s not just retail expansion - it’s a shift in how food brands operate. For some, restaurants may be becoming brand engines for more scalable, profitable channels. At the same time, demand is changing. The steady flow of weekday lunch customers - especially younger workers

Takeaway habits are starting to reveal something deeper about how we live and it’s not just about income. New research suggests people across all income levels spend roughly the same share on takeaways. The difference is frequency and experience. For some, it’s routine. For others, it’s occasional. What separates them isn’t money, but culture. That has real implications: two customers on the same salary can behave completely differently and traditional targeting misses that.

Something unusual is happening in hospitality right now. Not gradually, not evenly, but in a way that’s setting the sector apart from the rest of the economy. Over 85% of hospitality businesses are worried about energy costs - more than double the national average. That alone is eye-catching. But the real story sits underneath the numbers. A large share of pubs, restaurants and hotels are about to lose the protection of fixed energy deals they locked in after the 2022 crisis.

The term stagflation is reappearing in forecasts, bringing back echoes of the 1970s, when inflation surged, growth stalled and uncertainty defined both consumer behaviour and business decision-making. This week’s report looks at that period and, more importantly, what it means for today. Back then, hospitality was small and still developing. Today, it’s a vast, deeply embedded sector - more exposed to energy costs, labour pressures, and global supply chains. That difference

There’s a version of the AI story in hospitality that sounds reassuring.Efficiency gains. Smarter forecasting. Better staffing. Less admin. And much of it is true. But over the past few months, while working on a broader project on AI and ethics in business, I’ve become increasingly convinced that we’re missing the more important risk - particularly in foodservice. It’s not about chatbots or customer-facing gimmicks. It’s what’s happening quietly in the back office. More and

A new dataset from the ONS contains a number that helps explain what is happening to Britain’s high streets: 37.6. That’s the gap between employment in hospitality and retail on central high streets. In 2015 both sectors started at 100. By 2024, hospitality had risen to 118.2 while retail had fallen to 80.7. The high street, in other words, isn’t emptying - it’s being repurposed. Retail is shrinking, but hospitality and other services are expanding, leaving overall employme

While the geopolitical implications of the major escalation in the Middle East will dominate headlines, there is a pressing question for UK foodservice operators: How could this affect your business? My latest analysis explains how events thousands of miles away can quickly reach the UK hospitality sector - starting with energy markets and moving through supplier pricing to consumer behaviour.In this issue, I look at: Energy price volatility and what it could mean for operat

The recent delisting of Loungers following its takeover by Fortress Investment Group was not an anomaly but part of a clear trend. In barely two years, multiple quoted restaurant businesses have exited public markets, despite arguments that listings provide the permanent, patient capital the sector needs. The reality is starker: investors have been voting with their feet and to all intents and purposes AIM has ceased to function as a viable home for restaurant growth. This w

Discounting is back in the spotlight - and once again, pricing is being blamed for hospitality’s problems. This week’s issue looks at why that diagnosis may be too simplistic. The first article responds to a recent piece by Olivia Vachon, CEO of Eatphoria, published in Propel. Her argument is that operators under pressure are reaching for discounting too quickly, commoditising their offer - and that the answer is to invest in brand. It’s a persuasive case. But it raises a que

Failures per £1bn of sales - using data from the ONS - appear to be down 24% since pre-covid. But strip out inflation and that improvement shrinks dramatically. Yes, fewer businesses are dying. But fewer are being born too. Churn is slowing. The market is maturing. The real question is whether upcoming cost pressures reverse that trend. In this week’s issue, I also revisit the idea of state-backed public restaurants. The DISHED pilot, led by Nourish Scotland with partners inc

This week’s issue connects two signals that look separate, but aren’t. American restaurant brands are either closing, or racing to expand in the UK at the same time. Is this just competition or the first sign that brand origin, politics and cultural sentiment are starting to influence where British consumers spend? At the same time, operators keep saying “this generation is different” - less resilient, harder to manage. But what if the bigger risk is the story we’ve learned t

New data and recent industry results point to two important shifts that could materially change how restaurants win customers and protect margins, yet both are still flying under the radar for many operators. One is about how consumers are now choosing what to eat. The other is about where AI is actually working (and failing) in foodservice. First: consumer nutrition priorities have flipped. Search data shows that protein has overtaken both fat and carbohydrates as the domin

Last week, a BBC article about virtual restaurant brands lit a fuse. Independent operators called the practice “sneaky.” Consumers wrote to say they felt misled. And one short quote of mine, lifted from a longer conversation, triggered a wave of reactions that forced me to rethink parts of my own framing. At first glance, this looks like a familiar story: big chains versus small independents, corporate muscle versus local identity. But the reality is messier and more interest

June looked like a recovery for UK hospitality. By December, that hope had vanished. In six months, insolvency risk has doubled. Half the sector is back to running on less than three months’ cash. The numbers resemble 2020, but the anxiety is far higher. Operators aren’t reacting to today’s trading, they’re bracing for what’s coming. With April’s minimum wage rise ahead, there’s little resilience left. The result is unlikely to be mass closures, but something slower and more

Why does a Greggs sausage roll cost 26% more on Just Eat, but a pizza costs exactly the same as in-store? Dig into the pricing data and a revealing pattern emerges. Almost everything Greggs sells on delivery carries a neat 22% markup… except pizza, where the premium vanishes entirely. That anomaly isn’t accidental. It reveals how Greggs thinks about competition, margins and which categories it’s willing to subsidise to stay relevant. But the pricing story is only the first