ABSTRACT
Retail agents have a whole category of uses that they call F&B, or food and beverage. It covers bars and restaurants, coffee shops and takeaways, with subsections covering roadside uses, transport interchanges and food courts. There has been an explosion of interest in street food, a trend imported to the UK from Asia via the US. In a recent blog, ‘More Songs About Buildings and Food’ the architectural writer Drew Austin suggests that in the 1970s all of New York’s culture was in some way connected to music, be it venues, clubs, boom boxes on the street, record stores and the media. The food and beverage sector is at a different stage of the economic cycle to mainstream retailing. Some of the competitor restaurants offering better prices on the app do not even exist. It is in a mature phase of the market where consolidation and commodification is the rule, rather than market innovation.
