The UK pub catering market remains the powerhouse of the overall pub market as operators increasingly focus on sales from food as a priority area.

The market faces challenges, such as from the expansion of casual dining venues and ethnic restaurants, particularly those expanding from London to the regions. However, focusing for example on locally sourced ingredients should help pubs to reassert their place at the heart of their local communities.

Innovating, for example, by offering restaurant-style food such as trios of main dishes and game, can support a perception of pubs as a place to go for special occasions. Meanwhile, ensuring their coffee offer is a quality one and in step with current trends should enable operators to tap into the lucrative out-of-home coffee market.

Definition

Pub catering is defined as covering meals of any kind sold in public houses, with the exclusion of any drinks and also excluding packaged snack products (eg crisps, nuts, pork scratchings).

All pubs (public houses) and bars have on-trade licences to serve alcoholic drink for consumption on the premises. These licences may also be granted to other outlets, such as hotels or cinemas, but a pub has at least some traditional characteristics that differentiate it from other bars.

Licensed restaurants are excluded from Mintel’s definition of pub restaurants, as are hotels for which drinks form only a part of the overall business. Other premises, which may have full on-licences but are not generally open to the public, including licensed clubs, a variety of leisure venues and college bars, are also excluded.

Some important terms connected with the pub business are:

  • Tenanted or leased pubs are run as businesses by independent publicans who pay rent to the owner of the property and also contract to take supplies from the property owner’s company. The supplies mainly only involve beer, this system dating back to the origin of most pubs as ‘tied’ houses controlled by brewers. The modern multiple pub-owning company (a ‘pubco’) usually has no formal connection to a brewer.

  • Managed houses are pubs that are owned and managed by the same company, not leased out to an independent publican. Most pub restaurants that operate as part of a group of such pubs are managed houses, often still owned by brewers or by ex-brewing companies (eg Whitbread, one of the many brewers that sold its breweries in 2001).

  • free house has no contract to a specific pubco or brewer, and is run as an entirely independent business.

  • Gastropub is an unofficial term for a pub that employs a chef and aims to compete directly with restaurants on innovative cuisine.

  • Wet sales refers to the proportion of a pub’s turnover from drinks (sometimes confined to alcohol), while the term dry sales refers to food turnover.

Value figures throughout this report are at retail selling prices (rsp) and include VAT, unless stated otherwise.

Market sizes at constant 2014 prices are devised using Mintel’s foodservice deflator.

Crown copyright material is reproduced with the permission of the Controller of HMSO and the Queen’s Printer for Scotland.

Abbreviations

ALMR Association of Licensed Multiple Retailers
BHA British Hospitality Association
BBPA British Beer and Pub Association
CMA Competition and Markets Authority
FSA Food Standards Agency
GNPD Global New Products Database. For further details, please contact Mintel on 020 7606 4533
LCFCGA London City Farms and Community Gardens Association
M&B Mitchells & Butlers
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