Checklist: Prepare Your Food and Beverage Business for the Busy Festive Season

[Helen]

For many businesses this is the busiest time of year. If you are one of those businesses, we are here to help you prepare. 

Our team has put together a short checklist to ensure your business is set up for success - from staffing, hardware, and social media content. 

Join the Food & Beverage group to share what else is on your prep checklist.  

Hire Seasonal Staff, Soon 

It’s difficult for anyone to ignore the labor shortage, which is hitting the food and beverage industry especially hard. Here are just a couple of resources for you if you're finding it hard to hire staff:

• For US businesses – check out the US Chamber of Commerce website which has resources and guides, such as a roadmap for solutions for working parents.
• For UK businesses – take a look at this Town Square blog post to learn How to Prepare Your Seasonal Staffing Strategy. 

You can also use recruiting sites to hire seasonal workers. Indeed has some great tips about hiring seasonal staff, including that you should start hiring sooner rather than later to get ahead of the competition, i.e. all of the other businesses who need seasonal staff.

Please use comments below to share any hiring resources you’ve found helpful.

Review and Update Your Menu 

Review and make updates to your menu in advance so that team members know it like the back of their hand. Make sure to give new team members time to get familiar with your item catalog and your Point of Sale before they start interacting with customers.

If you have a long menu, add favorites to your Point of Sale to make it easy for new team members to find popular items during the lunch time/happy hour rush.

If you already manage your menu with Square for Restaurants check out the new Restaurants Mobile POS, an easy to use point of sale that allows you to take orders tableside and manage online orders too. 

Build Your Social Media Calendar 

Start planning your festive 'holiday season' social media content now. It can be as simple as making a spreadsheet where you can list your ideas and pencil in the dates/times you’ll share the content. 

Square Small Business Evangelist @Pesso shared this advice about how he managed social media content for his ice cream store:

“Instead of randomly taking photos and posting them as we felt like it, we built out a schedule on a spreadsheet to keep our posts varied and engaging. We started out  posting every other day, and more recently we’ve started to post everyday. We set up our Instagram posts to automatically post Twitter too, to have a wider reach and impact with no extra work.” 

Not sure what to post? Here is some inspiration:

• Unsurprisingly, Instagram has some great tips on their website Creative Instagram tips: How to make posts and reels stand out.
• Are your customers on Tiktok? Read FAQs from Square sellers:  TikTok Q&A: Ask us anything about the new Square TikTok integration.  

New to Square's Food & Beverage Community? Join today.