Latest / From Kitchen to C-Suite™ / PULSE! Today’s Hotel, Restaurant & Bar Industry News Deep Dive | 09/07/2026 Episode
Transcript
- Brad Peters: Welcome to Pulse, today's hotel, restaurant, and bar industry news, a deep dive from HRB Universal, navigating your industry. With insights from leaders, South Carolina just flipped the script on liquor liability, offering restaurants massive insurance discounts for tightening their operations, right as the hospitality industry unexpectedly leads the entire nation in job growth. It is ⁓ honestly a massive structural shift. Like we are looking at a total recalibration. of risk and reward in this industry, moving away from purely punitive measures and you know actually underwriting operational discipline. Yeah, completely. Welcome to Pulse, today's hotel, restaurant, and bar industry news deep dive brought to you by HRB Universal. We are delivering the critical updates, trend analyses, and operational intelligence you need to stay ahead in hospitality. Glad to be here. I am thrilled to have you because today we have just a towering stack of data to get through. We are talking directly to you, the general managers, you know, the regional directors, the hotel executives, and the independent operators who are out there steering the ship day in and day out. Right, to people actually on the ground. Exactly. And today's mission is all about connecting the dots between these seemingly isolated events. Like we've got the 2026 Food and Beverage Trends Report, we have breaking August BLS labor statistics, and ⁓ we have some Frankly, alarming food safety alerts that you simply cannot afford to ignore. Yeah, you really can. Okay, let's unpack this. Because to make sense of this landscape, we really need to look at how regulation, consumer biology, and labor realities are all, you know, colliding at the exact same time. And I mean they are colliding at high speed. The operators who are merely looking at their own daily P L statements while ignoring these macro level shifts. They're gonna find themselves entirely outmaneuvered by the end of the year. ⁓ absolutely. The central theme running through literally every piece of news we are analyzing today is the desperate need for operational predictability. Whether you are managing risk at the bar, securing a fragile supply chain, or ⁓ dealing with rapidly shifting diner demographics, the mandate for leadership right now is removing the guesswork. Right. Because the margin for error has just evaporated. It really has. So let's get right into the regulatory space because this story coming out of South Carolina is turning heads nationally and for very good reason. We are looking at a groundbreaking new liquor liability law taking effect in 2026. Yeah, this is a big one. Let me set the stage for anyone outside the state. Previously, if you were pouring drinks in South Carolina, you were required by law to carry one million dollars in liquor liability coverage. Now, under this new legislation, they have dropped that minimum requirement down to $300,000. Which is huge. Right. But there is a catch, and it's substantial. You only get that lower threshold if you adopt specific codified risk mitigation practices. And that seven hundred thousand dollar gap? I mean, that is the state recognizing that the traditional model of dram shop liability was just breaking the back of the hospitality industry. Definitely. Historically, liquor liability laws across the country Have been entirely punitive. The system basically waits for something catastrophic to happen, like a DUI or an over-service sensitive resulting in injury, and then the legal hammer falls on the establishment. Yeah, and then everyone pays for it. Exactly. Insurance premiums were skyrocketing, regardless of how safe your specific operation was, simply because the general risk pool was so incredibly high. What South Carolina is doing here could easily become the legislative blueprint for other states. Because it completely shifts the paradigm. It changes everything. It is heavily incentivized. The state actuaries are basically saying, we will lower your required safety net if you can prove to us that you are actively preventing the fall. It's like the safe driving plug-in your car insurance company gives you, but you know, applied to a high volume bar. If you prove you aren't slamming the brakes and speeding every day, your rates drop. That's a great way to look at it. So I wanna do the math on this and break down exactly what these discounts look like because the numbers are just staggering. First, if an establishment stops alcohol service by midnight, that reduces the required coverage by two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Second, if you train all your servers within sixty days of hire, that takes another one hundred thousand dollars off. Third, if you keep your alcohol sales under forty percent of your total revenue, that's another one hundred thousand. Right. And finally, if you use forensic digital ID scanners between midnight and four AM, you knock off another one hundred thousand dollars from your required coverage limit. When you isolate those specific line items, you see exactly where the data scientists and state actuaries have identified the absolute highest vectors for liability. Like stopping service at midnight is the largest discount by far a quarter of a million dollars. It's massive. It is. That tells us that the statistical probability of a catastrophic event just multiplies exponentially after midnight. Furthermore, the forty percent revenue threshold is a clear indicator that venues operating primarily as liquid-driven spaces, ⁓ like nightclubs and dive bars, carry inherently more risk than food-driven spaces. Yeah, they're playing a different game entirely. Right. The state is systematically rewarding the restaurant model over the club model. But the breadth of who this impacts is what really caught my eye in our sources. Because this isn't just for the neighborhood dive bar down the street. The net is incredibly wide. It covers everyone. We are talking about traditional restaurants, hotels, and resorts with on-site lounges, event venues, and banquet halls catering weddings. The text even explicitly calls out collegiate sports venues. Yeah, the stadiums are in on this too. Plus breweries, distilleries with tap rooms, and this is the wildest part to me, 501c3. Nonprofit organizations hosting fundraising events. And that sweeping inclusion is honestly the most critical takeaway here. The casual approach to alcohol service is officially dead across the board. It really is. I mean, if you are a museum hosting a black tie gala or a charity running a Saturday afternoon golf tournament, you might think of yourself as a low risk community organization. Right. You think you're immune. Exactly. But this law says otherwise. You are now operating under the exact same intense liability microscope. As a high volume sports bar across from a college campus. The state is sending a very clear message. If you want the privilege of serving alcohol and you want the financial protection of lower insurance limits, you have to professionalize your risk management regardless of your tax status or you know your primary business model. Which brings us to the operational reality of this. Like, let's put ourselves in the shoes of a GM running a heavy-hitting, multi-concept restaurant group in Charleston. You have to sit down and do a really hard cost benefit analysis this afternoon. Absolutely. The math isn't simple. No, it's not. You need to calculate the exact cost of purchasing these forensic digital ID scanners. And we aren't talking about the cheap blacklight flashlights here. We are talking about network connected hardware that scans the micro perforations and ultraviolet layers of a license. Plus, you have to pay for the software subscriptions that come with them. You have to calculate the payroll cost of having staff sit through mandatory server training every single time you hire someone new. Which is constantly and perhaps the most painful calculation, the potential revenue lost by cutting off the taps at midnight on busy Saturday. You have to weigh all of those very real, immediate hard costs against the benefit of dropping your required insurance coverage by $700,000. You know, the analysis becomes even more complex when you move beyond those hard costs and look at the cultural shift required within the four walls of your building. Consider that sixty day training window for new hires. ⁓ man. In an industry with historically high turnover, keeping compliance records pristine is essentially a full time job. Imagine the logistical nightmare of tracking a nineteen year old busser who just got promoted to a server position mid month. Yeah, how do you even stay on top of that? How does your HR software track their specific 60 gay window? Because if a plaintiff's attorney finds out during discovery that one single server on a busy Friday night was on day sixty two of employment without their state certification, and an over service incident occurs. Your entire insurance discount could be invalidated. Precisely. You would suddenly be exposed to massive uninsured liability. That is a terrifying thought. You are quite literally betting the house on your shift manager's ability to maintain flawless HR compliance on a Tuesday afternoon. A lot of pressure. And honestly, that same demand for flawless tracking at the front door with ID scanners and training logs is now being violently forced onto the back door at the loading dock. Which brings us to our next major operational threat. Yeah, the supply chain stuff. We have to look at the severe escalation in foodborne pathogens. Because the supply chain is showing significant cracks right now. The news here is incredibly grim. There has been a fatal outbreak of Bacillus serious directly tied to a restaurant environment. And simultaneously we are seeing a massive, unprecedented outbreak of cyclospora. The cyclospora data is what should be forcing every supply chain director and executive chef to audit their walk in coolers immediately. According to the CDC, over the past eight months, the prevalence of cyclosporiais infections is approximately twenty-six times higher than the infection rates we see in a typical year. Twenty-six times. That's insane. We are talking about tens of thousands of Americans falling ill. And for those unfamiliar with the biology here, cyclospora is a microscopic parasite. It isn't just a mild stomach bug, it causes severe, debilitating gastrointestinal distress. That can linger for weeks. Yeah. Often requiring targeted antibiotics. That sounds awful. It is. And right now the FDA and CDC are investigating at least four entirely distinct concurrent clusters of this infection. Let me just repeat that stat so it sinks in. Twenty-six times higher than a normal year. That is not a statistical anomaly, and it's not a slight uptick in reporting. That points to a massive systemic failure somewhere in the pipeline. Absolutely. Our sources reference Bill Marlar, the prominent food safety attorney. Who has handled some of the biggest foodborne illness cases in history, and he points the finger squarely at supply chain consolidation. Marlar's analysis highlights a structural vulnerability we've built into our food system. If we look at how agricultural distribution is structured today, it is highly centralized for the sake of efficiency, year-round availability, and you know, cost control. Which makes sense on paper. Right. You have a handful of mega farms and massive processing facilities in places like the Salinas Valley or Central Mexico. Supplying the vast majority of the country's restaurant produce. Three or four decades ago, if a local farm had a water contamination issue, a few independent restaurants in a Tri County area might experience an outbreak. Today, a single contamination event at one processing hub, like a compromised irrigation line or a sanitation failure on a sorting belt. His immediate national consequences. Wow. A single batch of contaminated basil can be loaded onto trucks and hit thousands of restaurants across multiple time zones within forty eight hours. And the really terrifying thing about Cyclospora specifically is how resilient it is. From what I understand, it owes notoriously difficult to wash off produce. It's not like you can just tell your prep cooks to run the cilantro under the sink for a few extra seconds and call it a day. Yeah, that is the biological hurdle right there. Mm-hmm. The oocycists of the Cyclospora parasite. are highly resistant to standard chemical sanitizers, including the traditional chlorine washes used in processing plants. So the washing doesn't even kill it. Exactly. This is exactly why the action item here is so critical for leadership. You simply cannot rely solely on your line cooks rinsing the lettuce to save your restaurant from a lawsuit. Right. The intervention has to happen before the product ever crosses your threshold. Operators must rigorously audit their supply chains. You need to know the true origin of your fresh produce, not just the name of the distributor who dropped it off. Are your broadline distributors sourcing from agricultural regions currently flagged by the FDA? What are the specific water testing standards of the farms they contract with? This means the GM and the executive chef need to be having very uncomfortable, very direct conversations with their broadline distributors. You can't just accept the invoice blindly and assume it's safe because it came off a branded Refrigerated truck. No, you really can't. But even if you do everything right on the purchasing side, you also need to enhance your back of house training, specifically around cross-contamination, because the stakes are too high. Let's say a contaminated batch of green onions sneaks through. Right, it happens. If your morning prep cook chops those onions and then uses the exact same cutting board and knife to prep the ready-to-eat tomatoes for the dinner salads without fully sanitizing the station. You have just magnified your exposure exponentially. Your sourcing protocols and your daily kitchen discipline have to match the scale of these national risks. The mindset shift required here is moving to a purely defensive operational posture. Just as the new South Carolina law forces you to defensively manage your front of house alcohol risk through rigorous ID checks and early cutoffs, these pathogen outbreaks are require an equally defensive posture for your back of health supply chain. It's all defense. Right. In a consolidated food system where pathogens can travel across the country in two days, the margin for error is absolute zero. Okay, that is a lot of heavy defensive strategy. I want to shift gears from defending the bottom line to aggressively expanding the top line because there is massive revenue potential hidden in our next block. ⁓ absolutely. Let's dive into market trends and consumer shifts. We have fresh, comprehensive data from the twenty twenty six Food and beverage trends report by Informa Connect. And the overarching theme dominating the research is the absolute revolution of functional ingredients. And this isn't happening in a vacuum, it is being largely driven by the explosion of GLP one medications. I mean, this is arguably the most profound behavioral shift we have witnessed in dining habits in over a decade. The baseline data shows that seventy percent of all Americans Are actively trying to consume more protein in their daily diets. Which is a huge number on its own. It is. But the true insight emerges when you look specifically at the demographic taking GLP1 weight loss medications like Ozempic or Wigovi. The numbers become hyper-targeted. Among GLP1 users, 56% are actively selecting high protein menu items, and 42% are aggressively seeking out high fiber foods. And while that shift in food preference is happening, we are simultaneously seeing a massive historic drop in alcohol consumption. Gallup is reporting that US alcohol consumption is currently at its lowest level since 1939. That is just wild. I want everyone listening to really think about that. We are drinking less alcohol now than at any point since the tail end of the Great Depression. So as an operator, you have diners coming in who want hyper-functional, nutrient-dense food. And they are actively rejecting your traditional high margin liquid sales. To understand the magnitude of this, we have to look at the biological mechanism behind why these GLP one medications are changing consumer behavior so drastically. These drugs don't merely suppress appetite, they fundamentally alter the brain's reward center and significantly delay gastric emptying. So they're physically full longer. Exactly. The food literally sits in the stomach longer. Yeah. This explains why we are seeing a mass rejection of heavy alcohol and greasy calorie-dense foods. The body rejects them, and the brain no longer craves the dopamine hit from a sugary cocktail. That makes total sense. What's vital for operators to understand is that wellness is no longer a niche boutique concept reserved for the vegan cafe in a trendy neighborhood. It is now a mainstream baseline expectation. Yeah, everybody wants it. Millennials in high-income households, who happen to be the primary demographic adopting these GLP1 medications, are driving this demand. The trends report cites compelling data from revenue management solutions showing that almost 50% of diners would actually switch their restaurant choice entirely just to get better protein options. Over one third would abandon their brand loyalty for more fiber-rich options. Let me push back on this for a second though, because I see a real danger here. Are we in danger of turning our bars and restaurants into clinical pharmacies? If people go out to eat for joy, for celebration, for indulgence, if we are sitting in menu development meetings just engineering dishes to hit specific macros and fiber counts, how do we keep the experience delicious? We are in the hospitality business. We are supposed to be selling pleasure, not clinical nutrition. That exact tension is the primary challenge every culinary director in the country is grappling with right now. But the answer certainly isn't to pivot to serving bland medicinal food. The industry solution is what we are calling stealth health and seamless functional upgrades. Okay, stealth health. I like that. Right. It's similar to a parent sneaking pureed vegetables into a child's macaroni and cheese, but on a premium culinary level. The modern consumer desperately wants the preventive health benefits. They want the adaptogens for stress relief, the collagen for skin health, the probiotics for gut biome support. But they absolutely demand that it is wrapped in a premium, delicious, and indulgent experience. That lines up perfectly with what the report specifically calls out regarding younger consumers. They want non alcoholic options that actively do something for them biologically. Millennials are the leading demographic spending money on alcohol free drinks, but they aren't just buying a club soda with a lime wedge for five dollars anymore. No, they expect a lot more. They want zero-proof cocktails infused with botanicals like Ashwaganda or a lion's main mushroom that provide a mood altering effect without the hangover. The revenue implications here are massive. For operators, this functional beverage and food space is a wide open green field for new high margin revenue streams to replace those lost alcohol sales. Because they still want to spend the money. Exactly. You only have to look at what massive scale players like Starbucks and Duncan have successfully implemented. They are seamlessly offering protein powders, matcha, or collagen add-ons to their everyday morning beverages. Right. Independent operators, hotel food and beverage programs, and fast casual concepts need to emulate that architecture immediately. You should be offering a $2 collagen boost in your morning coffee service or a premium plant-based protein upgrade on your lunch salads. You are essentially upselling wellness. The twenty twenty six FEDI Award favorites, the food and beverage awards highlighted in the Trends Report, give us some fantastic practical examples of how manufacturers are solving this problem for operators. ⁓ yeah, the new products are incredible. They really are. They highlight a product called Egg Life Egg White Wraps. These wraps have eleven grams of protein and basically zero carbs, serving as a perfect neutral base for healthy dishes. Or look at the Moroccan spice cubes from a company called Chunk Foods. Those are fantastic. Yeah, these are low-carb, high protein, plant-based items, but they are packed with intense North African flavor profiles like smoked paprika, cumin, and roasted garlic. You are hitting the exact macros the GLP1 consumer wants, but you aren't sacrificing an ounce of flavor to get there. And that demand for intense flavor leads perfectly into the other major consumer shift happening simultaneously, because while one massive segment of the population is hyper focused on biological function and operational efficiency. Another segment, and crucially, often the exact same consumer on a different day of the week, is demanding overwhelming extrasensory dining experiences. Yeah, it's wild how we flip flop. The industry is experiencing a severe bifurcation in dining habits. We're seeing a hard split between grab and go value and the extrasensory experience. I wanna look at the value side of that split first because the data we have from Placer dot AI is frankly mind blowing. According to their tracking, 73.9% of McDonald customers are also buying food and beverage items at Dollar Tree. That is just Let that sink in for a moment. The traditional quick service restaurant customer is so economically squeezed by inflation and the general cost of living that they are cross-shopping at literal dollar stores to piece together their daily meals. That statistic entirely redefines what value actually means in 2026. Value is no longer just defined as a cheap, heavy burger. Value now equals operational flexibility. Right. It's the ability for a busy, dual income, cost conscious worker to grab a high quality, fresh meal quickly without friction. And this is exactly where convenience stores are aggressively pouncing on the vulnerability of the traditional restaurant model. They really are coming for the crown. The data shows 65% of sea store owners expect their food sales to increase over the next year alone, and 49% of them credit freshly prepared on-site items for their recent sales bums. It's a huge shift in their business model. You see major strategic moves happening at the corporate level to support the slam grab. Pilot, the massive National Travel Center Network, just named Shiva Hoders as their new VP of food and beverage. Her entire mandate is to push their proprietary pilot eats concept, elevating gas station food to fast casual standards. They are coming for restaurant market share And they have the real estate and convenience factors to win it. So the strategic question becomes if you are a traditional restaurant operator, how do you defend your turf against a convenience store that is suddenly serving fresh, high quality food? Exactly. What's the play? You have to build a highly flexible footprint. You must maximize your back-of-house prep for seamless grab and go execution. You have to utilize your point of sale systems to support digital takeout orders just as efficiently as your dine-in service. You might even need to start selling pre-packaged retail versions of your most popular proprietary items, like your handmade pastas, your signature salad dressings, or specific sauces. You have to allow the customer to capture your flavor profile at home on a rushed Tuesday evening, even if they can't afford the time or money to sit in your dining room. But then fast forward to Friday night, and that exact same squeezed consumer wants to be absolutely dazzled. This is the other side of the bifurcation. The dine-in customer doesn't just want a plate of food anymore, they want a theatrical event. They want a show. They really do. The trends report dives deeply into the influence of crunch talk, these viral ASMR food trends on TikTok where younger diners want to literally hear the sizzle, feel the snap of the crust, and experience aggressive, contrasting textures. The standard for dine-in has been permanently elevated. Merely being delicious is no longer sufficient to justify the cost of dining out. The dish has to engage all the senses simultaneously. Visually and audibly. Right. It must have immediate visual appeal for social media, auditory feedback when you bite into it, and the complex mouthfeel. Furthermore, we are seeing a massive culinary shift toward savory, or what the industry is calling swavory sweet and savory combined flavor profiles to hit multiple palette notes at once. The FABI awards hit on this sensory demand perfectly. They showcase products like Sabatino's Calabrian Truffle Crunch, which is essentially a Mediterranean spin on the chili crisp trend, loaded with black truffle and crispy fried garlic. That stuff is amazing. Or gourmet Culinary Partners Bang Bang Shrimp, which features tail-on shrimp wrapped in a shattering crunchy spring roll wrapper. And my personal favorite example of this trend is the Dubai Chocolate Phyllo Triangle. ⁓ the Dubai chocolate trend is everywhere. It takes that massive viral social media trend and folds rich pistachio cream and toasted katafi into layers of buttery phyllo pastry. It's literally texture layered on top of texture. The vehicle for delivering these intense sensory experiences is increasingly global flavor. Innova Market Insights notes that nearly 75% of diners worldwide actively want to sample international menu items. And we are moving way past standard Americanized Italian or Mexican fare. Consumers are seeking out highly specific regional flavors. The global trend map in the report is fascinating. We are talking about ingredients like Japanese ostrich meat, Vietnamese corn milk, avocado coffee, African periperi chicken, and authentic Latin American chimichuri. It's a massive expansion of the palate. Data Central found that ninety three percent of surveyed food service operators plan to expand their global menu items in the next two years. If we connect this to the bigger picture. I like to view global flavors as a passport to growth. The strategic takeaway here for leadership is to utilize limited time offers or LTOs as your testing ground. Okay, how so? Well, you keep your core everyday menu highly stable, recognizable, and operationally efficient to fight off the C store grab and go threat during the week. But you use your LTOs to introduce these bold, hypersensory international ingredients. The trick is to wrap an unfamiliar ingredient. like a fiery African periperi sauce in a highly familiar format like a crispy chicken sandwich or a rice bowl. You make it approachable enough that they aren't intimidated, but exciting enough to drive premium experiential dine in traffic on the weekends. Okay, we have covered the regulatory threats with liquor and pathogens, and we've mapped out the shifting consumer palate from functional GOP1 diets to sensory global flavors. Now we need to look at how we actually execute all of this inside the building. Let's look at operational strategy, technology, and labor. This is where the rubber meets the road. We have a very fascinating dynamic happening with technology right now. According to restaurant business, citing the National Restaurant Association's state of the industry report, sixty percent of operators breaking down to sixty-two percent in limited service and fifty-seven percent in full service are planning to invest heavily in customer experience technology in 2026. Right. But here is the catch. They are making these massive capital investments while overall foot traffic remains stubbornly below twenty nineteen pre pandemic levels. That is the critical nuance that most people miss when they look at tech adoption rates. Operators aren't buying technology to manage an overwhelming surge in growth. They are buying technology to fiercely defend the bottom line and the stagnant, highly competitive traffic environment. They're protecting what they have. Exactly. When foot traffic is soft, every single dollar of spending has to be justified and every operational inefficiency is magnified. The goal of this tech investment isn't the sci-fi nightmare of replacing human hospitality workers with robots. The true goal is total operational predictability. So, what does this all mean? If I'm understanding this correctly, it sounds like we're using technology to put bumpers on the bowling alley for our staff. We aren't asking the software to throw the ball for them, we are just Using the technology to make sure the staff literally cannot throw a gutter ball when it comes to standard operating procedures and service standards. I think the bumper bowling analogy is perfect. Yeah. If you listen to the insights coming from top enterprise operators, the entire philosophy is about removing friction from the employee experience. Cody Wong, who is a major multi-unit franchisee for day taught chicken, talks extensively about baking expectations, labor rules. and daily workflows directly into the POS system. The point of sale and the back office technology physically enforce the consistency. So the manager doesn't have to. This completely liberates the shift manager. Instead of the manager running around the floor acting as an overpaid hall monitor, constantly correcting minor ringing errors or checking break times, the system prevents the errors from happening in the first place. That's huge. It is. The manager can then spend their valuable time actually coaching the team Touching tables and elevating the hospitality experience. Mitch Miller from Cameron Mitchell Restaurants echoed that exact same sentiment in the reports. Using digital tools to prepare teams ahead of time so they can hold their notoriously high service standards effortlessly. So, the actionable takeaway for our listeners here is to conduct an immediate technology audit in your building. Yep. Absolutely necessary. You need to look critically at every piece of software you are paying for. Keep the tools that simplify the guest's decision path and keep the tools that bake your labor compliance rules directly into the workflow. And ditch the rest. But you need to mercilessly discard any tech tool that simply takes operational friction and shifts it from your staff onto the customer's shoulders. If your QR code ordering system makes the guest do the server's job, but creates a cold, frustrating experience, that technology is failing you. That intense focus on tech enabled predictability ties directly into the labor data we just received for August. Because while technology is helping manage the floor and ensure compliance, the human element, the actual workforce, is undergoing a massive structural shift of its own. Wait, I want to look closely at these August Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers because honestly, I'm a little confused by what I'm seeing. Yeah, that's a bit of a puzzle. On the surface, the top line numbers look fantastic. Total non-farm payroll grew by 162,000 jobs. And restaurants actually led all non farm industries in job growth, rebounding sharply after two straight months of alarming losses. Right. Unemployment nationally is sitting at four point one percent, but in the hospitality sector it's slightly higher at five point six percent. Now here's where the math doesn't seem to add up for me. Despite all this aggressive hiring and job growth, operators are not actually increasing their overall headcount hours. How does that work? Are operators just hoarding workers? It is a counterintuitive data set until you look at the underlying strategy. The total number of jobs on the payroll is indeed up, but average weekly hours per employee have fallen significantly compared to pre pandemic levels. Okay, so more people, fewer hours. What this tells us is that operators are relying much more heavily on part time labor to fill in the scheduling gaps. They are intentionally building a more fragmented, highly flexible workforce. Why would they do that? Because traffic patterns are so unpredictable right now. Operators don't want to be burdened with full-time staff standing around during a dead Tuesday lunch rush. They want a roster of part-time employees they can deploy surgically. But when you intentionally build a highly fragmented part-time workforce, doesn't the absolute most critical metric for your HR department become retention? Because part-time workers generally have lower loyalty to the brand? That is the exact challenge. The data certainly backs this up. Forty-nine percent of operators say retention is now their absolute top priority. Vastly outranking aggressive hiring campaigns. They have finally realized they can't just keep pouring water into a leaky bucket and expect to stay afloat. The realization that retention is cheaper than recruitment is finally taking hold. And this trend is mirrored perfectly in the twenty twenty six hotel forecast as well. Hotels are dealing with the exact same labor fragmentation and shifting economic tides as restaurants. The forecast shows a heavy strategic push toward property conversions rather than ground up new builds, simply because capital is expensive and they need to move fast. We are also seeing a rise in strategic partnerships, like Hilton, launching an apartment collection brand to capture extended stay travelers. ⁓ that's smart. It is all about institutional agility. In the hotel space, they are bracing for intense competition, particularly in the lifestyle segment, by being as flexible as possible with both their physical real estate and their labor models. So The operational mandrate for everyone listening, whether you run a 300 room luxury lifestyle hotel or a 40-seat neighborhood bistro, is to shift your entire HR apparatus away from aggressive, desperate recruiting and pivot toward fierce, uncompromising retention. You have to protect your team. You have to implement fair, predictable scheduling. If your staff is primarily part-time, their schedule cannot be a chaotic mess posted the night before the work week begins. Or they will simply leave for a C store or a warehouse job that offers them stability. Or walk out the door. You need transparent communication and you need flawless timely pay systems. If you can stabilize your workforce using the bumper bowling technology we just talked about, you win the margin game. It truly is one deeply interconnected ecosystem. You use technology to create predictability, which fundamentally improves the daily employee experience. A better employee experience drives retention. Which ensures you have a trained staff capable of executing those high-end global flavor sensory LTOs. Those exciting LTOs defend your premium dine-in revenue against the convenience store grab and go threat, all while your trained staff is maintaining the strict compliance required by new laws like South Carolina's liquor liability changes and defending against supply chain pathogens. Wow. Every piece relies on the others. It really is a fascinating puzzle when you step back and look at it all together. We have covered incredible ground today. From legislative shifts and parasitic outbreaks to the biology of GLP1 medications and the mechanics of part-time labor force. We really ran the gamut. Before we wrap up, I want to leave you with one final provocative thought to mull over as you head into your weekend service. We discussed how South Carolina is aggressively incentivizing liquor safety with massive insurance discounts. And we discussed how functional medical adjacent ingredients are driving restaurant traffic. So what happens when major health insurers start offering monthly premium discounts to restaurants that sell verifiable, heart-healthy, functional menus? What happens when your liability insurance and your guests' health insurance dictate your menu development? That's a profound thought. The lines between hospitality, wellness, and corporate risk management are blurring faster than we think. And that wraps up today's edition of Pulse. Before you get back to your floor or executive suite. Make sure to check out the other powerful shows in the HRB Universal Network. Highly recommend checking those out. First, Kitchen to C-Suite, your definitive roadmap for advancing hospitality careers from entry level up to executive leadership. Next is Misan Place. Culture First Leadership and Organizational Strategies focused on safety, compliance, and building top-tier workplace culture. Both fantastic resources. Then we have the Recipe for Results podcast, Extra Fast. High impact x-ries packed with operational tactics and actionable solutions. And finally, 86 yearring the bad habits, cutting out systemic operational flaws, bad leadership habits, and inefficient practices across hotels, bars, and restaurants. Really great lineup. This deep dive is supported by the generous commitment of our sponsors, and we extend a special thank you to HRB Universal. Their dedication to providing comprehensive resources and promoting excellence is key to empowering professionals across the culinary and hospitality industries. Absolutely. We also want to acknowledge the Plate and Poor Collective Equity Partner Program. This initiative exemplifies a true commitment to fostering shared success and equitable growth within the food and beverage sector, helping entrepreneurs build a more inclusive and thriving future. The journey to the C suite is fueled by innovation, relentless dedication, and the right network. Takes a village, right? It really does. We encourage you to engage with the resources and support offered by our sponsors. For details on how to connect with HRB Universal and the Plate and Poor Collective Equity Partner Program, visit HRBuni.com or search HRB Universal online. We look forward to having you join us for our next deep dive where we will continue to explore captivating topics designed to elevate your career and entrepreneurial drive. Stay ahead with Paul Cerese. Today's hotel, restaurant, and bar industry news deep dive brought to you by HRB Universal. Don't not miss a beat. 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