Cocktail costing: Are your bottomless brunches and happy hours bleeding profit?
The party season is here, and with it comes the cocktail craze. Bottomless brunches are everywhere and happy hours with 2-for-1 offers have become almost an expectation during non peak hours. They draw crowds and boost sales but are they quietly draining your profits?
The hidden costs behind every glass
Cocktails can be a goldmine when costed and controlled correctly, but they can just as easily become a financial black hole. Managers often focus on the spirits, installing optics, using jiggers and training staff to pour to the millilitre. But what about the other ingredients in the glass?
🍋 Fruit Purées & Syrups
Those colourful purées and syrups look innocent enough, but they can be the most expensive part of the drink. Unlike spirits, they are rarely measured as strictly, meaning staff may overuse them especially when the manager’s eyes drift elsewhere.
🍓 Fresh Fruit & Garnishes
Fresh produce has a short shelf life, leading to waste if you over-order. Seasonal price spikes make this even riskier during the festive period.
A real world example
We work closely with a nationwide, multi site restaurant group operating more than 40 venues across the UK and what we uncovered during routine stocktakes was eye opening. Our reports revealed a shocking deficit running into thousands of pounds on cocktails, an issue that was spread consistently across all of their sites.
Naturally, the first suspicion was over pouring of spirits, but that wasn’t the case. The rum, which formed the base of their best selling cocktails, was purchased in large, cost effective quantities and measured using strict controls. Instead, the real culprit turned out to be far less obvious: a premium fruit purée being used in several of their most popular drinks. Packed with a high fruit content and carrying a hefty price tag, this ingredient was being overused by staff in what seemed like small, harmless amounts per drink but across dozens of sites and hundreds of daily servings, those extra squeezes multiplied into a significant financial drain.
With no strict measuring system in place for puree’s and no one monitoring usage as closely as they did with spirits, this costly error quietly racked up thousands of pounds in hidden losses. Fortunately, our experienced stocktaker’s identified the mystery quickly, traced the source of the deficit and worked with the management team to put new controls in place, stopping the financial leak before it escalated further.
Recipe for a great Strawberry Daiquiri
50ml White Rum
25ml Lime Juice
25-30ml Strawberry Puree (adjust based on brand sweetness)
Garnish with Strawberry and Lime
Ice
Training, monitoring & software: protecting your cocktail margins
The solution isn’t to stop serving cocktails it’s about costing them properly, training staff thoroughly, and monitoring usage continuously. Regular stocktakes highlight problem areas, reveal unexpected costs that may be spiralling and keep your GP where it needs to be.
Even the best cocktail recipes can quietly destroy your margins if staff aren’t trained to measure all ingredients accurately but our software, Logonn, takes the guesswork out of costing by calculating cocktails down to every single ingredient. From spirits and liqueurs to fruit purées, syrups, and garnishes, Logonn provides complete visibility of your margins. By tracking usage and costs in detail, it ensures that even the smallest ingredient doesn’t quietly erode your profits.
Don’t let festive cocktails become a festive loss. Measure everything, train staff carefully, and review your costings often because sometimes it’s not the rum that’s ruining the party, it’s the fruit purée.
Curious about what’s actually included in our stocktake reports?
Take a closer look here and see the detailed insights we provide to help your business save money and run smoothly.
continue reading
