MARCH–APRIL 2004 COVER STORY

Instant Gratification

On-Site Food and Beverage Options Keep Customers
at the Range to Fill Their Stomachs and Your Pockets

By Denise D. Wood

The spring golfing season is in full swing, but barely two-thirds of your customer’s first bucket of practice balls has been hit before his stomach starts to rumble. In the distance, just beyond the wooded edge of the range, a pair of golden arches beckons as the hunger pangs increase.

One more grumble from within the belly and hunger wins out over practice, as yet another customer leaves to spend money elsewhere to satisfy his need to feed.

“The key purpose in having food [service] is keeping the customer on the property longer,” says LaMott Smith, a partner at Golf ProfitBuilders, a golf consulting firm based in Egg Harbor Township, N.J. “If you don’t offer any food, you are almost encouraging people to go down the road to eat. If you have food and drinks and can keep customers there to eat, then you just might get them to hit another bucket of balls or buy another drink.”

Outdoor activities stir up, at the very least, a thirst in most people. So satisfying this most basic need is where range owners should start as they consider how large or small their food and beverage offerings need to be.

“The minimum should be beverages,” says John Zaruka, CEO of ZGolf Food and Beverage Services, a Camarillo, Calif., consultancy serving golf course F&B operations. “Ideally you want a fountain. But if that isn’t an option, put in a vending machine, but have something.”

Not If, but How Much
For range owners the question isn’t whether to offer food and beverages, but how much. Options include low-maintenance vending machines, a snack bar with more substantial offerings or a full-service restaurant.

“It is so important to maximize all aspects of a range operation and that includes food and beverage,” says Arthur Jeffords, a partner with Lighthouse Golf Group, a Marietta, Ga.-based consulting and management company. “You need to maximize all potential sources of revenue....You can’t ignore the food industry.”

Just say the words “food industry” and images of permits, licenses, special fees, inventory, additional personnel, more space and expensive kitchen equipment are conjured up—none of the headaches a range owner got into the golf business for. Though adding refreshments to the range may require some permits and additional initial costs, how many and how much depends on the scope of the operation.

Vending machines present the least amount of headaches and offer a low-cost point of entry. Plus, they’re “ideal if you are limited on space,” Zaruka says. “Vending machines don’t require any permits and you can do them any number of ways. The easiest way is to have the company provide the machine and the product and you get a commission off what is sold. There are also options where you can buy the machine and have the company place the product.” The benefit of vending machines, he adds, is that they don’t require permits, much space or a lot of maintenance.

But if space allows, the profit margin of fountain drinks is much higher than bottled or canned beverages—about two-thirds more by Zaruka’s estimates.

Putting in a fountain does require some extra effort and expense, but Zaruka’s advice is to do it. “A fountain requires drainage, and you are going to have to be able to get water to it and that may require some construction and there will be permits involved, but this is worth it.”

From the fountain, the transition to a candy rack and grab-and-go foods is simple. “There are some very good prepackaged sandwiches that you just pop into the microwave, even hamburgers. These are really good quality now and there is no major kitchen equipment required,” says Zaruka.

The trickiest part of making that leap may be ordering the appropriate amount of food so that stock doesn’t have to be thrown out before it’s used or levels don’t get depleted too quickly.

Doug Stanton, general manager at Mid-Atlantic Golf Center-Kingstowne in Alexandria, Va., admits it took two years of being open through the winter and summer seasons for him to get a handle on ordering enough, but not too much, food. “It was really trial and error,” he says. “During the high season you are placing an order every week to maintain the levels, but [during the winter] you really need to plan it out carefully and only order every three or four weeks. You don’t want to cut it so close that you are caught short, but you want to minimize waste.”

Put It Within Reach
To help maximize food revenues, ranges can serve golfers outdoors rather than waiting for them to come inside and eat.

Several years ago the driving range at Reston National Golf Course in Virginia, just outside of Washington, D.C., did exactly that.

The range already had a snack bar in the pro shop, but decided to market its food offerings differently to the professionals and suburban golfers who spent their lunch hour hitting balls.

“People like to go there during their lunch hour and hit balls. We just made it a little more attractive for them to do so by making it easy for them to eat too,” says Golf ProfitBuilders’ Smith, who at the time was regional vice president with American Golf Corp., which owns the course. “For a fixed price you get a bucket of balls and either a hot dog or burger, chips and a drink. We took a grill out onto the range and sold the smell.”

The special ran from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. and quickly expanded to an after-work deal. Mike McGillicuddy was the general manager at Reston National at the time.

“We had a great location there to set up and do it,” he says. “We had tables and a nice patio for people to sit at and they could watch other golfers hit and relax. The smell was great and really enticed people over.”

However, that same plan didn’t work at the range at Maryland National Golf Club, where McGillicuddy is now GM. “We ran into some major permit issues here in Frederick County,” he says.

Health codes vary by location, but state and county officials told McGillicuddy that serving food from a grill outdoors wasn’t permitted. According to the officials, the area must be screened in, there must be readily available running water and at least one sink. “In other words, it needs to be a regular full kitchen,” says McGillicuddy. “They told me they expect this to become fairly standard throughout the country soon. We never had any trouble in Virginia, but I think that is changing.”

At Maryland National, McGillicuddy has the bare minimum for the driving range—a water cooler—and occasionally a beverage cart is taken out to the tee line.

The Right Neighbors
For high-volume stand-alone ranges or entertainment complexes that offer miniature golf, batting cages and other amenities, making the investment to create a small sports bar may be the way to go. That’s the direction Mid-Atlantic took initially.

“We wanted a sports bar type of theme with light entrées and burgers and sandwiches,” says Stanton.

But the center got an even better deal. In an effort to offset some of the mortgage, the owners sold an adjoining plot of land to a Ruby Tuesday restaurant and the result has been a mutually beneficial relationship. Mid-Atlantic and Ruby Tuesday exchange coupons and offer group outing packages, but the general flow of people through both facilities has been the big coup.

“People come here and play and then go right over there for dinner or lunch,” Stanton says. “[Ruby Tuesday] gets a lot of people who come in to eat and see us and say, ‘Hey, we didn’t realize that was there,’ and come play miniature golf after dinner.”

But Mid-Atlantic hasn’t relied entirely on Ruby Tuesday to feed range customers.

“We don’t have a grill, but we have microwave burgers, hot dogs, pizza, snow cones and ice creams...a different niche than Ruby’s,” Stanton says. “We still serve beer. The only thing we cannot do as part of our agreement is provide waitress service.”

That’s fine with Stanton. Having a wait staff would take the range into a whole other realm that Zaruka says could counteract the benefits of the range’s F&B operations.

“You need to make this as low a cost operation as you can,” he says. “You should not get yourself into a setup where you have to have three extra people on at any given time just to handle the food. The restaurant business is not the range business and you do not want this to become too complicated. The food service should complement the range business, not take away from it.”

In other words, keep it simple.

Managing the food side of the range business shouldn’t be difficult for staff. “If you get to the point where you need someone else to manage your food operations, then you have gotten too complicated,” says Zaruka. “You can have a lead employee working in that area, but don’t try to do so much that you need to seek outside management.”

Though Stanton admits that Mid-Atlantic may miss out on some food sales because his staff is also selling buckets of balls, he isn’t convinced it’s worth the extra cost risk to hire dedicated F&B staff.

“Is that cost going to pay off?” asks Stanton. “It really just depends. We have things that are simple and that can hot-hold for several hours and that our staff can keep up with while still handling the range business. That works for us.”