Cellar and wine list of restaurants become digital: “good both for restaurants and producers”

Apps, e-commerce and digital tools have changed and continue to change every day the relationship between producers and consumers, that is becoming more and more direct, also in the world of wine, with a powerful acceleration of this process due to the pandemic. Times, when ordering take-away food and direct home delivery via smartphone has become a habit for many, as it is at this point, booking a table in a restaurant, or consulting a digital menu. But digital approach does not only look in one direction, at the relationship with the customer in order to improve the use of the service, it also looks at what is upstream, at the relationship with suppliers to make it more efficient and, therefore, make less expensive the production costs. In this context, the restaurant’s cellar plays an important role not only because wine is a decisive element of the catering offer but also because incorrect management of the cellar can compromise the real economic results of the business. A topic of the round table named “The digital cellar of the restaurant”, staged at “Host”, the hospitality fair, also today and tomorrow, in Milan, signed by Fipe / Confcommercio and “The Winesider”, led by Giovanni and Giacomo Miscioscia, president and CEO of the company, which “is the first service offering the entire cellar on delivery, with a weekly billing and reordering system based only on the bottles sold. All thanks to automatic payments from the restaurant’s current account or credit card. With no risk of unsold goods, no fixed assets, and paying only for the bottles that the restaurant has sold”, also thanks to the TWS4restaurant platform, whose algorithm is also able to provide real-time analysis of the wine offer performance of the restaurant, as read on www.thewinesider.com. However, the digital evolution of the wine market, even for catering, is a topic to be addressed. The stop imposed on public businesses by the lockdown and subsequent restrictive measures in the last 18 months, have weighed significantly on the turnover of the wine sector: - 2.7 billion euros, equal to approximately 38% of the revenues guaranteed by the sale of the bottles in bars and restaurants. As we have mentioned already several times before, the high-end products, whose consumption has always been the prerogative of the public establishments, have suffered particularly in recent months. Now that the catering sector has restarted, a rebound is also expected for the world of wine: Unione Italiana Vini (Uiv), underlines the Fipe / Confcommercio, estimates a + 19% in 2021 which will bring the value of the catering channel to 5.3 billion euros. “An extremely positive figure - comments Giancarlo Deidda, counselor of Fipe / Confcommercio and restaurateur - which, however, will not allow us to fully recover the losses. The pandemic must push us to a process of cost rationalization and management efficiency. The cellars of the restaurants must be managed by combining attention to the client and attention to economic and financial sustainability. With this, technology can help a lot”.