While inventory management has always hinged on food trends and changing customer tastes, there is going to be a lot more on your plate when it comes to keeping the kitchens, bars, and pantries stocked going into 2026. Things food and beverage managers and restaurant owners used to take for granted may be less readily accessible with tariffs, supply chain challenges, changing government policies, and shortages caused by climate change. In a time where the only certainty is that nothing is certain, pivoting and quick thinking are key in making sure you have what you need when you need it.
“Honestly, tariffs and rising costs have forced the industry to get a lot smarter about how we source and structure beverage programs,” says Seth Alexander co-founder of Barrel Aged Management, a hospitality advisory studio in Miami. "We advise our clients and partners to look at the full picture (import costs, freight, seasonality, guest buying habits, etc.) and use that to decide what stays, what shifts, and what gets reinvented.”
Mina Haque, Tony Roma's CEO, meanwhile, stresses that her F&B managers and decision makers have become “very intentional” about rethinking how to source its beverage program over the last year. This is no small feat given the international popularity and scale of the barbeque-centric upscale chain. They have expanded the use of their domestic and regional suppliers, tightened the product mix to eliminate low performers, and built stronger relationships with distributors who can deliver more stability on pricing.
“With tariffs touching everything from imported spirits to wine and even packaging, we’ve had to move away from a “set-it-and-forget-it” approach,” says Haque. “Today, our beverage managers look at sourcing the same way we look at menu innovation—data first, creativity second.”
Dining and Stocking Like A Local
Consumers continue to respond positively to the message that dining locally and supporting local businesses benefits the environment and the local economy. While many chefs, restaurant owners, and managers at better restaurants have enthusiastically supported this objective, restaurants in other categories and price points are embracing this mindset with both customer preferences and practicality in mind.
“One of the biggest shifts we’ve made is leaning into local partnerships that actually strengthen the brand story,” says Haque, which helps locations in this large restaurant group feel unique to the community they serve. “A good example is what we’re doing in Tennessee with Tennessee Shine Co., creating location-exclusive cocktails that highlight local craft spirits. This is the kind of strategy we want to replicate—lean into regional flavors, support local producers, and give guests something they literally can’t get anywhere else. It lowers our exposure to tariffs, shortens the supply chain, and builds immediate guest connection. It’s the direction we’ll keep pushing into 2026.”
Jenna Rogers, Senior Director of F&B at Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts in Orlando, FL, observes that the upscale diners' discerning tastes involve supporting US-made products and supplies. As the arts center has welcomed 5.7+ million visitors from all 50 states and 80+ countries since opening for both performances and special events, it reflects a social responsibility that everybody can relate to.
“Supporting local and domestic suppliers isn’t new for us—it’s how we already do business,” she says. “We’ve leaned into national products more than ever before. We’re proud to offer local options, like our Broadway Brew, which has become a signature favorite. “We’ve made a strong shift toward national and domestic wines. Sourcing largely within the U.S. has been a big advantage, though we still look for exceptional products wherever they come from.”
Rogers notes that stocking locally made goods is integral to the center’s food and beverage philosophy, particularly as they are committed to social responsibility and giving back to the community. “We partner with local businesses whenever we can,” she says. “We source locally-made products, from Kelly’s Ice Cream to Popcorn Junkie (a mom-and-pop favorite), and we’re always looking for new ways to bring in Central Florida purveyors."
Man Power vs. Machine
Even if menu ideas and recipe trends spring from the minds of creative chefs and their teams, Amber Trendell, Senior Director of Strategy for hospitality trade-centered suite Oracle Restaurants, says that embedded AI can provide them a major assist in forecasting demand, engineering menus, and optimizing loyalty data to grasp what is needed to stock the right ingredients and the right amounts of them. The platform and programs can help them better understand segment-specific feedback so the restaurant buyers can purchase elements of recipes that are most likely to sell rather than just what was sold last month.
“Despite discretionary consumer spending constraints, we still see demand for premium beverage upselling at the point of purchase,” Trendell observes based on how the Oracle suite has given its hospitality customers a better fix of what to buy to adapt to consumer tastes and what may be available locally and seasonally. She explains the AI-driven data platform also enables users to create better customer segmentation and deploy offers with higher redemption rates, ultimately improving customer dwell time and lifetime value.
“With integrations across POS and NetSuite’s generative AI Prompt Studio for example, brands can use real-time inventory data from Simphony POS to recommend new menu items utilizing stock on hand, helping to mitigate waste and improve sales,” she says.
“Inventory is one of those things that used to be painful, but tech is finally catching up in a way that makes it less chaotic,” says Alexander in how he helps his advisory clients negotiate the process. “We have our own systems in place, but advise and train all of our clients and partners in tightening up par levels, tracking usage in real time, weeding out slow-moving SKUs, and building clearer ordering patterns so nothing sits around getting dusty. Waste reduction is also a huge focus: understanding where we lose products, where over-pouring happens, what’s going stale, and fixing it before it becomes expensive. It’s smarter, easier, and honestly makes the bar team happier.”
Alexander finds that AI and tech are becoming a big part of how people run their beverage programs. He describes his consultancy as an “early adopter and explorer of AI since it was introduced to our market.” Over the last three years, his firm developed a proprietary tech stack that uses AI, comp set, predictive sales, and trends to ensure the right things are purchased in the right amounts and stored correctly.
“This is used for pricing, menu redesigns, trend predictions, and understanding guest behavior,” he explains. “On the operational side, IoT helps monitor draft lines, refrigeration, and anything that can spoil or waste money. The goal isn’t to replace the human touch; it’s to give teams tools that prevent surprises and help them make decisions faster and be more creative with offerings. When you mix strong tech with a great team behind the bar, you end up with a smarter, more profitable program that still feels warm and personal.”
Haque has found using AI solutions were particularly useful in improving vendor relations. The sense of clarity AI provides helps her and her team build trust and stronger supply chains to create a win-win situation that results in consistency for the restaurants and stability for the vendors. “When we bring in a regional supplier, we loop them into our broader strategy—menu development, promotions, seasonal campaigns—so the relationship works both ways. We’re also building systems that make the partnership easier. As we roll out more AI and machine-learning tools, we can share real forecasting data with purveyors, which helps them plan production and inventory on their side.”
Tony Roma’s has also turned to ongoing AI-driven forecasting, rolling out across the system nationwide. As a result, it has so far made buyers and decision-makers operate in a far more nimble way than they did even a year earlier. Haque predicts that in the long term, the combination of AI forecasting, IoT monitoring, and robotics will give us a level of precision that wasn’t possible before. Less waste, fewer stockouts, fewer surprises. And that’s exactly where we’re headed.
“Inventory management is one of the areas where we’re seeing the biggest upside from AI and automation,” says Haque. “We’ve already deployed AI-assisted tools in several locations to improve prep planning, reduce waste, and bring more predictability to ordering. But we’re not stopping there. We’re actively testing robotics in our dining rooms and exploring how those same systems can support the bar environment—running, stocking, and even assisting with repetitive back-of-house tasks.”
However, AI may not be a catch-all solution for smaller or more specialized restaurants, even when technology has helped streamline procurement and storage. At the Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts, Rogers stresses that the restaurant management is not relying on AI for inventory management. Instead, they have developed systems that allow tracking food trends–and ingredients by extension–by show and genre. “We pay close attention to what guests are drinking and adjust accordingly, which helps us maintain leaner inventories below the national average,” she says. “On the technology side, we use AI cautiously, mainly for cybersecurity purposes, like filtering out phishing emails. We’ve found success in always being nimble and able to react."
Storage Smarts
As Tony Roma’s restaurants nationwide have overhauled their menus and modernized their prep processes, the teams identified certain solutions to extend product integrity and reduce waste, according to Haque.
“We’re reviewing both walk-in optimization and line-side refrigeration,” she says. “At the unit level, we’ve already started replacing aging line coolers, tightening up storage layout, and improving cold-chain management. As we expand AI-driven forecasting, we’ll be able to carry slightly leaner inventories without sacrificing availability—which makes every inch of storage more valuable. It’s not about bigger storage, it’s about smarter storage.”
Trendell says that based on feedback from Oracle Restaurants customers, they are leaning on clearer, timelier data and structured supplier programs to avoid reactive spot buying. Standardized vendor scorecards help them to prioritize partners with stable pricing and reliable fulfillment, while dual-sourcing and regional strategies reduce freight variability and protect continuity when category costs spike. This enables these venues to allocate their storage space accordingly.
“Stronger real-time integrations increase visibility into lead times and substitutions, so beverage lists stay reliable even when a preferred stock keeping unit (SKU) is constrained,” she says. “Contract flexibility helps cushion cost swings and improve cash flow without sacrificing quality. In parallel, menu engineering and mix management allow them to recalibrate features, bundles, and price ladders to protect perceived value while defending margins as input costs move.”
Storage for white tablecloth and high-end restaurants is equal parts specialized and pragmatic. Melanie Grant, Interiors Studio Director at CCY Architects in Basalt, CO, says that among her clients, chefs are asking for a tailored design to respond to the popularity of tasting menus and curated dining experiences. The storage design process needs to factor in ingredients that help build chef-led visions and attention to detail. “Our work at the restaurant Saint-Germain is an example of Chef-led, focused design, clear concepts, prix fixe menus, and their impact on sustainability, comfort, and dinner as (an) ‘event ticket’ return to European countryside dining where the chef creates a meal for you based on what is freshest.”
Rogers, meanwhile, says that while the center does its best with the space in the arts center’s dining facilities, the restaurant staff is adept at finding creative solutions if space does not allow for something to be stored inside the building. For example, during the annual Frontyard Holiday Festival at Dr. Phillips Center, an external walk-in cooler was installed to expand storage capacity.
While there will be some degree of trial and error with procurement and storage as the economy, government policy, and consumer tastes change by the day, Barrel Aged Management’s Alexander assures readers that there’s a blend of technology, creativity, and industry know-how to suit every kind of restaurant and bar. He explains his beverage managers use a mix of analytics and his firm’s tech stack to conduct cost analysis. Everything else happens through good old-fashioned industry instinct to To pinpoint domestic or regional alternatives that don’t compromise the experience.
“We have always put a focus on storage and par levels,” he says. “However, upgrading storage and back-of-house setups to better systems gives us longer shelf life and less waste. That means better wine and spirit storage, smarter refrigeration, improved keg monitoring, and more thoughtful spaces for ingredients like fresh juices, botanicals, and non alcoholic components that don’t last long. Some of this is equipment, some of it is organization, but all of it helps us keep quality consistent without over-ordering or throwing money away.”
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