A Week into IPL 2025: What’s in Store for the Food & Beverage? Discover Insights and Opportunities!
Few things unite Indians like cricket, cinema, and food – the common thread between the sport and the movies. It has been two weekends since the inauguration of IPL 2025, and the excitement surrounding the tournament remains as high as ever. Drawing rooms, hotel lobbies, cafes, and pubs have been echoing with cheers, sighs, unsolicited cricket strategies hurled at the screen, and expletives directed at underperformers. But what has the food scene been like, both earlier and this year?
Why Launching IPL 2025 Match Dining Offers Can Drive Profits? Discover F&B Industry Performance During IPL 2024
Last year, during the finals (IPL 2024), several pubs and bars nationwide reported about a 30-50% hike in bookings over regular weekends. Additionally, the heatwave in several parts of India didn’t seem to hamper the footfall at the F&B outlets. This suffices to say that cricket in India is a true cult, commanding a massive following of devoted sports enthusiasts who crave shared experiences to enjoy matches at their fullest.
Going by the restaurant trends and news articles published so far, IPL 2025 is set to be no exception; the cricket season will be a gala of delectable bites, loud match-viewing events, and profitable gastronomic innovations.
Create great memories with IPL 2025 special menus while delegating restaurant management to QPOS
Why is IPL a Major Season for the F&B Industry?
What makes mega cricket tournaments such as the IPL and the Champions Trophy a key season for the F&B sectors, especially for the restaurant and PBCL (Pub, Bar, Café & Lounge) owners, is that fans spend hours at the food outlet, snacking, drinking, and enjoying the collective viewing experience. In this way, groups of sports enthusiasts tend to run a large tab, driving massive sales.
Inspiration for IPL 2025 Special Menus & Offers from Top F&B Brands
F&B brands have leveraged the ongoing cricket fever to maximise their branding and sales. Here are two examples of top F&B players riding the IPL wave: Olio Pizza, the popular pizza franchise by Curefoods, has partnered with the Rajasthan Royals (RR) for their home matches to create in-stadium brand immersion. This cross-branded initiative includes pizza kiosks, fan engagement zones in the stadium, and branding across the concourse and the cheering podium.
Olio Dugout also has opened a flagship Rajasthan Royals-themed café just before IPL 2025 commenced, creating a great space for match watch parties. This store is set to be the first of a series of cafes celebrating the legacy of RR; the outlet will feature a mouth-watering branded menu, a dedicated RR merch store, and engaging fan activation events and activities.
Lays’ latest ad from the three-month campaign titled ‘Flavours of the World’ is hard to miss as one streams IPL 2025 or watches the matches on TV. The commercial stars Ranbir Kapoor and M.S. Dhoni, who are sitting on a couch and watching what is a cricket match. As the two celebrities exchange sneering looks at each other, we learn they support opposing teams named after the new flavours launched in the Flavours of the World campaign.
The casting of a cricket legend, the timing of the campaign, and corporate communication pieces by the brand suggest that the limited-edition flavours of this campaign – Korean Chilli, Mediterranean Pizza, and Mexican Salsa – have been launched to make the best of the IPL frenzy, which often accompanies munching. A key thing to note about this IPL 2025-specific branding is that the flavours have been carefully chosen based on the evolving Indian tastebuds, which, although open to experimenting with global cuisine, love a local twist.
What’s your strategy to stay ahead of the competition during this cricket season? Leverage IPL 2025 match dining offers, special menus, and other strategies to maximise profitability with QPOS
Key Takeaways for Crafting IPL 2025 Special Menus & Brand Immersion
Here is what we can learn from the campaigns above:
It is relatively easier than in other instances to capture the attention of the target group when they are already engaged in an activity they love, i.e., match viewing in this context. In other words, opportunities such as the key cricket season act as a perfect time to experiment with new menu items and understand consumer behaviour using promotions and combos like IPL 2025 match dining offers.
IPL 2025 and other such captivating events can be vital for reinforcing brand recall by attracting customers with event-specific offerings. In the PBCL and restaurant industry, this insight is particularly relevant when it comes to running campaigns on food aggregator platforms.
Looking for a solution which can help your food outlet tap into the business potential of this IPL season? Let’s look at how a restaurant-specific POS platform such as QPOS can help!
How Can Restaurants and PBCL Players Leverage QPOS to Maximise Profits in IPL 2025 Match Dining Offers?
As one of the market leaders in the POS software niche, QPOS can be an ideal choice for restaurant and PBCL owners to manage the surge in demand accompanying the upcoming matches of IPL 2025. The software has robust modules such as inventory management, recipe management, and analytics, amongst others, which help food outlets streamline their operations. Whether it is with IPL 2025 specials menus or dining offers on match days, here are some key capabilities of QPOS which can help businesses expand their bottom line:
Attracting Greater Footfalls to Match Watch Parties with Promotions, Driving Growth
As QPOS acts as the single source of truth in the business, owners can reach out to their regular customers using the customer data stored in its database. At the same time, the restaurant’s digital marketing stakeholder can acquire details of potential customers from third-party vendors to target more people for the IPL-themed offerings. The POS is vital in tracking the number of customers targeted and for upholding the brand consistency of the promotions.
Suggesting IPL 2025 Specials Menu Using AI, Boosting Customer Experience
Leveraging the AI capabilities of QPOS, food outlets can recommend the IPL-themed additions to their customers based on factors such as most-ordered specials, the best side dishes and drinks with the specials, and order history. This degree of personalisation not only fosters customer loyalty by adding value to the watch party experience but also helps the business track the performance of the dishes and consumer behaviour.
Menu Engineering & Inventory Optimisation for Improved Operational Efficiency
QPOS harnesses the power of AI to analyse ordering patterns of items promoted under IPL 2025 match dining offers and other menu items to help decision-makers:
- Refine their menu and recipes across the franchise
- Identify key inventory ingredients, thus reducing overstocking-led spoilage and stockouts
Apart from enabling quick data-backed calls on the trending special, the built-in Analytics in QPOS also has a chatbot which can help:
- Customise business reports
- Fetch specific pieces of information from the business database
- Create on-demand forecasting reports with just simple natural language prompts
Further, QPOS comes with OCR (Optical Character Recognition) capabilities, which capture information from the image of physical bills, thereby digitally parsing and updating inventory data. In this way, on busy match days and otherwise, the staff can not only spend precious business hours doing more substantial tasks than manually updating the inventory level in the POS system.
Flawless Order Management, Ensuring Good Service Even During Crowded Matches
QPOS connects the customer, the front-of-house, and the kitchen seamlessly, instantly generating and modifying KOTs (Kitchen Order Tickets). Hence, the restaurant POS reduces the chances of order mix-up and mismanaged preparations during peak hours, such as IPL match happy hour offers on food aggregators and watch parties.
Curious to know more about how your restaurant’s profitability can top the charts?
Reach out to our team of experts today and stay tuned for IPL 2025 updates regarding the F&B sector!
