Functions of F&B Operations

Food & Beverage Operations is an important pat in hospitality industry. It is more complicated than just operating a restaurant in hotel. Basically, F&B department must offer, at least, breakfast, lunch and dinner on a daily basis, and it must offer these meals in a manner that is in keeping with the quality of the hotel.

In addition, an effective F&B department may offer multiple, additional restaurant operations, twenty-four-hour room service, banquet operations, and a wide range of other food/beverage alternatives, including snack bars, coffee break, and meal services as part of convention/meeting operations, take-out and off-site catering, and vending and alcoholic beverage outlets in lounges, show bars, and lobby areas. All these kinds of service aim to offer different kinds of food and beverage which can satisfy different needs of customers.

Also, an effective F&B operation needs to contain strong backup departments like kitchen and stewarding. Providing efficient and planned preparation of all operating equipment could help maintaining good quality of F&B operation. It could enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of F&B service. If this department could not perform in right manner, it will greatly affect the daily operation.

Finally, the ultimate goal of all these function and department in Food and Beverage Operations is not just satisfying customers’ needs only but to satisfy customers’ desires and exceed their expectation.

INTERESTED TOPIC: Catering Event Order

There are two types of catering event order, one is holding the event within hotel and another is outside the hotel.

For on-site catering, most often are wedding, product launch, business conference, annual dinner, gathering and parties, and other motif that requested by individual customers. Hotels always set a planning team to give hands to clients for planning the events or sometimes will organize the hold events upon request. Here is the sample request form from The Mira Hong Kong.

Besides, hotels normally provides outside catering. Take The Mira Hong Kong again as an example, Customers can discuss with the events planners about the idea of the party and planners will design the menu based on their needs. Also, hotels will offer some set menu for specific festival especially Christmas party menu. Hotels also offer different types of outside catering like breakfast, lunch, cocktail and etc.

The Mira Hotel Christmas Menu

Outside catering services offered by Hong Kong Gold Coast Hotel.

Advantages of catering event order:

On services provider’s side:

1. Build word of mouth reputation

2. Can always make great profit from events held

On customer’s side:

1. Save time to organize events as many hotels have their event planning team

2. Able to get involve in designing the menu and event planning

3. Ensure the quality of foods

4. Can always request online, very convenient

Disadvantages of catering event order:

On services provider’s side:

1. Can only service some widely popular dishes to fit everyone’s general needs, the unique hotel dishes may not be able to be served.

2. A single small mistake will make customers feel disappointed

3. Some customers are stressed for everything to be perfect, it’s hard for the planning team to make good use of limited budgets and resources

On customer’s side:

1. Will always be charged a higher price to the same dishes that served in hotel

2. Limited choices of dishes if you chose the pre-set menu for outside catering

3. Have to make reservation, sometimes need to make reservation one month before the event held

Here is a simple for Catering Event Order in one Hong Kong Hotel:

In this page

Blue: Name of client (company, organization, etc.), address

Red: Time and Venue for all events of the client, GTD means the number of guaranteed attendees for the function, EXP means the number of expected attendees for the function

Purple: Setup detail for venues in each event

Orange: meal menu to provide

Green: Deposit and payment method or detail to charge the client

Blue: Detail of each specific services or food to charge

In this page, Beverage is about how beverage supply to charge and which drinks are free to supply. Other departments means which departments would be involved to set up this event then need the copy of the event order or other related documents. Breakeven is that how much the hotel to charge per person then could be breakeven (No profit and no loss).

Here are some venues setting sample for the specific event.

Trends and challenges in operating F&B operations

Trends:

Reducing Operation Costs

Reducing operating costs is a recent trend for F&B operations. Minimum wage and inflation increase heavy costs for F&B operations. Therefore, F&B operations need to reduce its costs in order to improve its competitiveness. For example labor cost, ost of raw materials, maintenance costs, manufacturing cost, etc

Healthy Eating

Gluten-free menus will grow this coming year even though a minuscule portion of the population suffers from celiac disease. Consumers are increasingly convinced that anything added to food is objectionable — and phases like gluten- and lactose-free somehow sound healthful and reassuring, and perhaps organic even though this is irrational. It is part of a “free-from” push that originated in England, applied to food products contained no “nasties.”

Focus on Employee Training

Many hotels keep on training staff to be more knowledgeable to sell the menu items in order to increase their profit. As frontline staff will have more interaction with customers, employee training can help staff and hotels build a good customer relationship.

Challenges:

GlobalizingChallenge of operating F&B operations is to make it globalize. As more and more F&B operations appear in the market, the competitiveness has been increased. It is difficult to fight with other F&B operations and expend its market share. Therefore, it is difficult to get a place in local market and even achieve globalization.

Handling food waste

Food SafetyAs customer's concerns over food safety gradually increases, restaurants will have to put more stress on watching over the food serving processes and monitor them so that defects will be at minimal. The risk of being on the receiving end of harmful after-effects from food will be lower and lower due to this emphasis.