From 11:59pm, Thursday, pubs, clubs and entertainment venues in Melbourne can open to 20 fully vaccinated customers indoors and 50 fully vaccinated customers outdoors. As Sydney’s venues reopened for the first time in months last week, we sat down with a couple of hospitality industry experts to share their reopening tips for hospitality in Melbourne venues.
Wholesalers can expect a surge at the last minute
Australia’s largest food and beverage wholesale platform FoodByUs saw orders ramping up quickly within the first week of trading, with a week on week increase in orders that were up by 357% on the Sunday before ‘freedom day’, compared to that of the previous Sunday. FoodByUs has seen continuous growth in orders from Sydney venues, with the first official weekend since reopening closing out orders at 452% higher than the two weeks prior.
Ben Lipschitz, Co-Founder and managing director of FoodByUs says: “We saw orders coming in as late as 10pm Sunday night for Monday’s trading. This was when we first started to see a really strong boost in ordering. Our platform connects restaurants and cafes with all their local wholesalers to find the best possible deals and the best quality produce, so they can compare the market, which provides much-needed savings after a challenging few months for the industry.”
In week one of trading FoodByUs saw a huge increase in orders for particular products such as Goats Curd (up 1685%), mixed berry muffins (up 1467%), Extra Virgin Olive Oil (1385%), cooking cream (up 1314%) and strawberries (up 1062%). Lipschitz attributed the increase in these products to the fact that restaurants were expanding their service now that they are offering dine-in options.
“Many restaurants are now back to offering more desserts and brunch options, compared to when they were just offering takeaway meals and might have been servicing only lunch and dinner times.”
Roster staff ahead of ‘freedom day’
Francesca Bartone-Prodromou, the owner of the North Sydney cafe Charlie & Franks, encourages venues to roster on staff ahead of restrictions easing so they can help prepare.
“In the week leading up to reopening, my staff were able to set up and get ready for the week.”
Francesca’s staff, who are trained to do everything from serving to deliveries to catering, spent the week before restrictions eased streamlining a contactless ordering system.
“Being busy over the weekend meant that having customers place their order and pay on the QR code really helped us to streamline our service.”
Don’t over-schedule shifts
Over-scheduling shifts in anticipation of a surge in customers is easy to do. Particularly for CBD venues that might be reliant on corporate customers who aren’t back in the office yet.
Francesca, who has a team of 30 staff, says she used pre-COVID roster levels as a guide when deciding how many employees to schedule on.
“Look at your numbers pre-COVID and assume that you’re going to be trading similar to your good days to start with. We’re based in North Sydney which means many of our customers are local corporates who work in the area. With many companies still working predominantly from home, we won’t be back to full capacity until early next year. However, we’re already receiving a lot of catering bookings for Christmas parties – be it delivered to people’s homes for virtual events or physical events in the office,” she says.