The Cornell Food and Brand Lab website caters to educators, health professionals, and consumers interested in food psychology, and was founded at the University of Illinois in 1992 by Professor Brian Wansink and moved to Cornell University in 2005.
The Food and Brand Lab consists of graduate and undergraduate students of psychology, food science, marketing, agricultural economics, nutrition, and a host of diversified studies.
Independently funded, research is geared toward better understanding consumers and how they relate to foods and packaged foods. Research from the lab has been reported in dozens of magazines and news outlet such as CNN, 20/20, ABC News, NBC News, the Wall Street Journal, and USA Today.
Wine Promotions in Restaurants
The Food and Brand Lab recently featured research on restaurant wine promotion and notes that despite the health benefits associated with drinking a glass of wine, restaurant wine sales significantly lag those of other alcoholic beverages.
The Lab points out that unlike beer and liquor brands in which customers are familiar, ordering wine can be overwhelming and intimidating — financially and socially — because of the great number of varieties, vineyards, countries and years available.
The Lab suggests three ways restaurateurs can reduce the uncertainty associated with ordering wine.
The Lab’s conclusions are based on research in which each promotion was introduced independently of the others and implemented in a 10–week field study in two casual neighborhood restaurants in Houston, Texas.
1) Offer Food–Wine Pairings
Suggest a certain wine or a food–wine pairing or by offering a low–cost tasting flight. Analysis revealed that offering food–wine pairings is very effective, as they generated a 44.5% increase in sales of the target wines as well as a 21% increase in total restaurant sales.
2) Flight of Five Wines
Data analysis revealed that promoting wines in a table tent is effective at increasing sales, but that promoting more wines at one time increased wines sales of the promoted wines even more.
Offering a taste of one wine to customers increased sales of that wine by 18.2% and offering a flight of five wines increased sales of those wines by 47.3%.
While providing a number of options in tastings or food–wine pairings can increase beverage sales, providing too many wine promotions at once can overwhelm consumers and negate this effect.
3) High–Margin Wines
The Lab found that 78% of the sales from promoted wines came from consumers who would have ordinarily ordered wine. Thus, to increase sales on promoted wines restaurateurs should be sure to use high–margin wines, promote wines that are mid–priced and above, and avoid margin–cutting price promotions.
Inquisitive foodie with a professional investigative background and strong belief in the organic farm to table movement. Author of Bad Seeds: A FriendsEAT Guide to GMO's.
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