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Hospitality glossary · Money and margin

Wet sales and dry sales

Wet sales are revenue from drinks and dry sales are revenue from food, and the split between them is one of the first things any hospitality operator or lender looks at.

Work out GP% on a dish or a drink All 40 terms

In practice

Wet sales and dry sales in a real operation.

Definitions are easy. What matters is how the thing behaves in a real operation, and where it tends to go wrong.

What it looks like in a UK hospitality business

The split matters because the two carry very different margins and very different costs to produce: drinks typically run a higher gross profit and need far less labour behind them, while food needs a kitchen, a chef and a prep operation. A wet-led pub and a food-led pub with identical turnover are not comparable businesses, which is why GP, labour percentage and staffing models are all normally reported against the split rather than against the total.

The mistake operators make

Pushing food volume to grow turnover without modelling what it does to labour. Adding a kitchen operation to a wet-led site adds chefs, prep hours, waste, equipment and a different kind of supervision, and plenty of pubs have grown their sales and lost money doing exactly this.

Questions

Wet sales and dry sales, answered.

Something here that doesn’t match what you’re seeing in your own business? That is usually worth a conversation rather than another article.

What does wet sales and dry sales mean in hospitality?

Wet sales are revenue from drinks and dry sales are revenue from food, and the split between them is one of the first things any hospitality operator or lender looks at. The split matters because the two carry very different margins and very different costs to produce: drinks typically run a higher gross profit and need far less labour behind them, while food needs a kitchen, a chef and a prep operation. A wet-led pub and a food-led pub with identical turnover are not comparable businesses, which is why GP, labour percentage and staffing models are all normally reported against the split rather than against the total.

What do operators get wrong about wet sales and dry sales?

Pushing food volume to grow turnover without modelling what it does to labour. Adding a kitchen operation to a wet-led site adds chefs, prep hours, waste, equipment and a different kind of supervision, and plenty of pubs have grown their sales and lost money doing exactly this.

Related terms

Worth reading next.

Gross profit percentage (GP%)

Gross profit percentage, or GP%, is the share of a sale left after the cost of the food or drink sold: sales minus cost of sales, divided by sales, times 100.

Labour cost percentage

Labour cost percentage is total staff cost — wages plus employer National Insurance, pension contributions and holiday pay — expressed as a share of sales for the same period.

Average spend per head

Average spend per head is net sales divided by the number of covers served in the same period, giving the typical amount each guest spends on a visit.

WHY Hospitality

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