Do you dream of someday managing a bar or restaurant? Perhaps you have dreams of being in charge of food and beverage service at a famous resort or even on a cruise ship. Regardless of where your specific food and beverage aspirations lie, having the formal education and training needed to successfully manage a food service operation is critical.
Is a career in food and beverage management right for you? Learn more about the role of food and beverage manager professionals, as well as common food manager skills and responsibilities, to determine whether this path may be suited to your strengths and career goals.
What Is Food and Beverage Management?
What does a food and beverage manager job description look like? Specifically, food and beverage managers are the professionals responsible for overseeing every aspect of food service operations within an establishment. This may include carrying out such duties as planning menus, ensuring quality control, purchasing ingredients/supplies, and training staff. Ultimately, the end goal of a food and beverage manager is to maximize an establishment’s profitability and efficiency while delivering excellent service to the end customer.
Why Management Skills Matter in the Role
Strong management and leadership skills are essential for food and beverage managers, especially in the fast-paced and dynamic environment of the modern restaurant, catering facility, hotel, or other establishment. These professionals must be able to motivate and guide their team members to deliver quality food and service with efficiency. At the same time, managers are under a lot of pressure to maintain a positive work environment while juggling a wide range of other responsibilities. For example, excellent leadership, organization, and problem-solving skills are necessary.
Essential Management Skills in Food and Beverage Management
Thinking about getting into food and beverage management? Discover some of the most important skills you’ll need to have in this challenging yet rewarding field.
Leadership and Team Management
Food and beverage managers must tackle the difficult task of leading and motivating extremely diverse teams in high-pressure environments. At the same time, because conflicts inevitably arise in all workplaces, these managers must also be prepared with conflict resolution and employee motivation techniques to keep things running smoothly.
Because restaurants are open on weekdays and weekends, managers must also handle the challenge of deciding which servers and chefs to schedule for a busy weekend, ensuring that they maintain their morale and productivity during a hectic time.
Operations and Efficiency
Another critical responsibility of the food and beverage manager is to streamline operations and maximize efficiency within an establishment as much as possible. This involves assessing current operations and pinpoint bottlenecks in service delivery, as well as formulating strategies to eliminate those obstacles.
Consider the example of a food and beverage manager overseeing the flow of orders between a kitchen and dining room during peak business hours. This professional must overlook and critique every employee’s move, looking for missteps that could be delaying service.
Financial Management
As you can probably imagine, food and beverage managers also need to have a fair amount of business acumen and an understanding of financial management skills to maximize profits. More specifically, these professionals must understand the ins and outs of budgeting, cost control, and profit analysis. They must also be able to choose pricing strategies that balance customer appeal with profitability for the business.
Food and beverage managers, for instance, are responsible for analyzing monthly financial reports and comparing actual spending to budgeted spending. From there, they may identify areas of overspending on inventory and implement practical solutions.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
The food and beverage business is very customer-centric, and managers are under great pressure to deliver exceptional customer service while addressing any complaints professionally. Managers can build long-term customer loyalty by training staff to deliver quality and personalized service while growing the establishment’s reputation within the community.
Unfortunately, mistakes and hang-ups happen in the fast-paced food and beverage industry. When a large party complains about slow service in a restaurant, for example, food service managers must be quick to address the situation and ensure the party’s ultimate satisfaction by offering discounts, free desserts, or other perks.
Day-to-Day Management Tasks of a Food and Beverage Manager
Running a food operation requires managers to handle many tasks and duties simultaneously, with common food and beverage manager responsibilities laid out below.
Staff Scheduling and Training
Keeping restaurants properly staffed is critical to ensuring operations run as efficiently as possible. With this in mind, food and beverage managers are tasked with creating weekly schedules aligning staff availability with peak business hours. This, in addition to organizing ongoing training and development sessions, can contribute to higher levels of service and streamlined operations.
Inventory and Supply Chain Oversight
Ensuring that establishments have access to all the ingredients and supplies needed is critical in the food and beverage industry. At the same time, food service managers must be careful to minimize waste. This requires careful tracking of inventory levels, as well as ordering supplies and negotiating contracts with vendors for the highest quality ingredients at competitive prices.
For example, a food service manager may learn to adjust order quantities for certain ingredients based on changing seasonal demand to keep kitchens well-stocked while reducing food spoilage.
Menu Planning and Pricing
Food service managers are also responsible for collaborating with chefs to design cost-effective menus while aligning with customer preferences and demands. This may include setting menu prices using in-depth market research and cost analysis and experimenting with new menu items. Some managers may launch a seasonal menu and use feedback from those menu options to refine the restaurant’s offerings in the future.
Monitoring Regulatory Compliance
Last but certainly not least, food and beverage managers have a critical obligation to ensure that all food, safety, hygiene, and licensing requirements are met at all times. This involves staying current on local health regulations and providing employees with updated training when laws and guidelines change. The FDA and USDA are responsible for maintaining and enforcing these compliance regulations, so food and beverage managers need to keep an eye on these entities.
How a Food and Beverage Management Degree Prepares You for Leadership
While a formal degree may not be a requirement for all food and beverage manager positions, the reality is that many employers do prefer to hire applicants with both extensive experience and formal education. A food and beverage management degree can prepare you for leadership roles in the industry in a number of ways.
Hands-On Training in Management Scenarios
First, a degree program with a career-focused curriculum can prepare you for the real-world challenges of working as a food and beverage manager with realistic simulations of common challenges, such as managing a full-service restaurant during peak hours or even resolving staff conflicts. With this hands-on practice, you may be better prepared to handle these kinds of issues in your own career.
Real-World Internships
Some degree programs in food and beverage management may also offer internships for students, where they can gain real-world experience working in the food service industry across any number of roles. This kind of immersive experience can be a great way for students to apply the concepts they’ve been learning in the classroom to a real workplace, better preparing them for the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead.
Coursework that Builds Core Management Skills
The right food and beverage degree program will also include coursework in industry-relevant topics, such as:
- Financial management for food service operations
- Leadership in hospitality
- Marketing and promotions for food and beverage
By following a career-focused curriculum, students can learn the concepts and management strategies that could serve them best in their future work.
Exposure to Industry Software
These days, more restaurants and other food operations are relying on high-tech software and tools to streamline their operations and maximize profits. In a food and beverage management degree program, students will be exposed to commonly used industry software and gain proficiency so they’re prepared to work with these tools after graduation. This includes training on POS systems, reservation management software, inventory tracking tools, and more.
Start Your Food and Beverage Management Degree at Baker College
There’s no denying that food and beverage managers have a lot on their plates. From hiring and training staff to menu planning, pricing, and maintaining regulatory compliance standards, the effective management of food service operations requires a great deal of skill and expertise.
If you’re looking to build upon essential leadership, finance, and customer relationship management skills, then it may be time to pursue your Associate of Applied Science in Food and Beverage Management from Baker College. In this 60-credit-hour program, you’ll train in state-of-the-art facilities equipped with the same tools food and management professionals use on the job. Meanwhile, you’ll receive hands-on instruction from experienced professionals in the culinary industry.Learn more about our Food and Beverage Management program by reaching out today. If you’re ready to take the next step, you can also fill out your application for admission!