A little bit of Google Analytics is sort of what led Reuben’s Brews into food service.
“I can’t even remember what year that was, but we were looking at what our plans would be for the future,” recalls co-founder Adam Robbings. “I was actually looking for what beers we should be doing. I looked at Google Analytics and typed in our name, and you know what the No. 1 search criteria for Reuben’s Brews was?”
It was “Reuben’s Brews food truck.”
Robbings was stunned.
“It’s like geez, we do all of our work around beer, and people only care about what the food truck is. Are you kidding me,” he said in mock anger during his Brewer Mag cover story conversation with wife and co-founder Grace along with brother-in-law and fellow co-founder Mike Pfeiffer in 2023. “Such a stake through the heart.”
Robbings added that the brewery’s CPA made this comment as well that stuck with him: People need to eat to live, but they don’t need to drink.
“One other thing that I heard was that we people arrange their visits and outings around meals,” Robbings said. “It’s like an anchor of the day, right? So why they’re always searching ‘Reuben’s Brews food truck,’ is because they’re trying to figure out where that anchor in that occasion will be.
“If you’re either changing the food truck or that food truck might not turn up, or they might run out of food and leave early, you can’t guarantee that. The food is kind of pushing us so now putting our own truck in was to put people’s minds at ease. They now don’t need to worry about that anchor of the occasion. We will have food here, it will be available and it will always be available. It should pair perfectly with the beers. And it should live up to our standards in every other way.”
So the brewery added its own food truck and used an off-site commissary kitchen to keep it supplied over the past few years for its Ballard taproom and in just this past year added a second location in Fremont that already had an on-site kitchen. So now both locations can have food service coupled with a large tap list.
Grace said she hopes it can enhance the overall experience for consumers.
“You can enjoy food and beer that bring people together in a way that perhaps it’s harder to do without those options,” she said. “That’s going to be for sure a big differentiator that we hope sets us apart and that we can use that as a tool to continue to draw people in.”
In addition to having a solidified menu, another key aspect of having their own kitchen versus working with an off-site kitchen is the ability to create beer pairings around food.
“You can’t do a pairing much with a food truck that just pulls up for one day of the week,” Pfeiffer said. “We’re able to actually pair food with beers since we’re setting our own menu.”
When it comes to the food the brewery wanted to create, Adam said to “know your why.”
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“What makes you different? Do you want the food to be different? Okay, will you be different in food? You don’t just add a restaurant in because that’s the trend,” he said. “Why is that different and why will you be better than others or give some other unique experience to people? I think that’s really what it gets down to. And that’s the harder question to answer.”
Also, when they were looking for spaces, a lot of the time the back-of-house to front-of-house ratio was off.
“The front-of-house, which is where you earn revenue in a restaurant, is too small relative to the back-of-house,” he said. “One place that had three different cold rooms in one restaurant, and over 50% of the space was back of house with either cold rooms, staff offices, or kitchens.
“That ratio will never pay for the space. If you do go into food, you need to know what you don’t know. I’ve only learned it just by osmosis.”
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