Bars, cafes step up to the crease with offers on IPL final night

New Delhi: Despite input costs surging and eating out bills turning more expensive over the past two months, bars, restaurants and cafes leveraged the IPL final night on Sunday to push footfalls and sales, making the most of the finale between Royal Challengers Bengaluru and Gujarat Titans.

Restaurants, pubs and bars were particularly reporting brisk business in Bengaluru, home to defending champions RCB.

"For tonight's IPL final, Daysie RR Nagar is close to being fully sold out," Anirudh Kheny, managing partner of the all-day casual bar, told ET on Sunday evening. "We anticipated strong demand based on last year's trend, so we opened reservations with a cover charge a couple of days in advance across all our reservation platforms...The intent was to confirm serious bookings and manage capacity better on a high-footfall night," he added.

Nirmal PV, cofounder at Mannheim Craft Brewery in Whitefield, said advance bookings were looking good. Instead of discounts, the outlet ran packages for drinks and ensured good visibility of screens to attract customers, he added.

In markets such as Delhi-NCR, restaurants screening matches across formats in markets such as Delhi-NCR were running discounts going up to 50% on booking platform District by Zomato.

"We are running a lot of offers around our delivery brands and are expecting a 30-40% jump in sales," Zorawar Kalra, managing director of Massive Restaurants, said before the match started. "For dine-in restaurants screening the matches, we are running offers around food and beers, and are expecting sales to jump by about 20-25% compared to a regular Sunday."

Massive Restaurants operates restaurant brands such as Farzi Cafe and Sly Granny.

Swiggy started a price war of sorts for its private label Noice on chips, soda and other packaged snacks, starting at an aggressive ₹9, directly competing with legacy brands in the category it retails on its platform such as Lay's chips and Britannia cookies.

Blinkit, on the other hand, leveraged the finals with deals across beverages, snacks, chocolates, ice-creams and even bar essentials such as ice-buckets and glasses. "With the heat wave across many parts of the country, we saw higher consumer sales offtake on quick commerce platforms compared to regular Sunday evenings, which we believe was to stock up and watch the match at home, over going out to a bar or cafe," said an executive at a leading salty snacks maker.

Apart from the large advertisers, brands such as Farmleys, Baker's Dozen, Hyfun and RiteBite were among those that advertised aggressively across platforms, media buying executives said.