Average weekly sales figure for restaurants revealed

Food-led bar and restaurant businesses made an average total of £18,000 in weekly sales for the past year.

That's according to research from Fourth Analytics, which studied benchmarking data from 3,000 outlets around the country.

The weekly sales figure of £18,000 marked a 2.7% rise on the previous year when it stood at £17,600.

Meanwhile, the average food mix was up to 77.2% (vs drinks sales), from 76.2% from the previous year.

The figures were presented by Mike Shipley, analytics & insight solutions director at Fourth, during a bars and restaurants forum held last week by Fourth, BDO and Barclays bank.

Other findings in the research included the fact that businesses generally achieved gross margins between 76% and 78%, while average labour costs across the industry are 28.8% (as a percentage of revenues), up 0.5% from a year ago.

Pubs, because they achieve higher wet sales, produce lower labour costs, at 26.7% of revenues (also up 0.5% on 2014).

Average hourly pay in the industry (based on these 3,000 sites) was £6.75, up 2.2%, although this looks set to rise in light of chancellor George Osborne's announcement last week that he planned to introduce a National Living Wage set at £7.20 per hour for people working and aged 25 and over from April 2016.

Average length of service in the establishments in the study was just 392 days - ie an employee turnover of 93%. This was a slight improvement on 2014 when average tenture was 385 days.

The worst rate recorded was 210 days' average service (6.8 months). The best industry retention recorded by the Fourth Analytics system was 631 days, or 20.3 months.

Shipley said: "When analysing these figures, we see a direct correlation between companies that proactively seek to engage and retain their teams, and those companies that perhaps do less work in this area."

When it came to staff absence, on average the sites studied lost 16.8 days per month through absence or illness, down from 18.2 days in 2014.

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