Super Bowl LX is on Sunday, February 8, 2026. For many restaurants and bars, the Super Bowl can be one of the busiest and most profitable days of an otherwise slow season. But it's not a sure thing. Just like with the teams on the field, a successful Super Bowl Sunday operation for your restaurant requires planning and execution.
According to the National Retail Federation, last year's Super Bowl LIX saw consumers who tuned into the big game spend $91.58 per person, totaling a record $18.6 billion. Most of that went toward food and drink purchases. But at the same time, a disproportionate number of that spending went towards hosting or attending a party rather than dining out. That means your takeout, delivery, and catering game needs to be front and center, not just your dine in operation.
Here are 5 steps to make sure your restaurant is ready to take advantage of game day spending with football fans.
1. Plan your menu items and drink specials for the big game
Start with your pick up & delivery menu
As mentioned above, most people plan to host or attend a party on Super Bowl Sunday, so your Super Bowl strategy should start with your off-premise game plan.
- Consider offering meal kits and group platters for customers planning on hosting their own Super Bowl parties—and encourage them to order well in advance so your staff can prepare beforehand.
- Tighten your online ordering menu for the big day with items that are profitable and manageable for your kitchen. See our tips below on menu engineering.
- If need be, limit certain items to dine-in ordering only. If you know, for example, you're going to sell out all your boneless wings and they're going to make more money in the dining room as part of a beer and wing pricing special, then remove them from your takeout menu.
- Update your online ordering menu and hours. With a first-party restaurant online ordering system like SpotOn Order, you can easily do this from your back-of-house settings, and with our Google Business Profile integration, it'll update your to-go menu on Google too.
- Make sure you have a way to convert guests ordering from third-party delivery marketplaces like DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Grubhub. An easy way to do this is to place a postcard in delivery orders with a link or QR code to your first-party online ordering system or mobile app like GoTo Place. This will encourage guests to order directly from you next time, cutting out the third-party commissions and ensuring you capture the crucial guest data to maintain that guest relationship. Click the link below to access our free post card and sticker templates.
Curate your game day menu and specials for dine-in guests
Like with any other high-volume sales day, it's a great idea to engineer your menu and make sure it's going to turn a healthy profit. That may mean trimming down your menu for Super Bowl Sunday, creating specials that pair together complimentary items, and adjusting pricing.
- Your most popular and most profitable items are your stars. Make sure they're front and center.
- For your equally popular but less profitable plow horse items, consider pairing them with higher profit margin items as part of combos or drink specials. Wings or pizza and a pitcher of beer are go-to classics, but get creative with specials that make sense for your brand and bottom line.
- Don't stop there. Be strategic with using pricing events. Super Bowl restaurant specials are the perfect way to entice crowds in with discounts on low-cost items that are easy for your kitchen and/or bar staff to crank out. Make sure these specials are programmed into your restaurant point-of-sale in advance.
- Trim the fat. If an item isn't profitable, don't be shy about pulling it from your menu. If preparing it is going to bog down your kitchen, scrap it. If you can't source enough stock from your suppliers to meet demand during the big game, pull it from your menu for the big game.
2. Spread the word
Once you have your Super Bowl menu, pricing specials, and any special events or activities planned, take a multi-channel approach to getting the word out to drive traffic to your restaurant.
- Go the traditional route with printing signs or fliers to place in your dining room and takeout bags.
- Post on social media with all the details of what you're planning for the big day. Be sure to advertise your hours, Super Bowl specials, events, and how to order online ahead of time for takeout orders.
- Send a marketing email to everyone on your mailing list. If you're using SpotOn, it's a simple matter to create both a social media campaign and a marketing email using our premade templates within your SpotOn Dashboard.
- If you're hosting a private watch party or running an exclusive Super Bowl menu or drink package, you can ask guests to register (and pay) in advance using event booking software.
3. Figure out your staffing
Look back at your staff schedule from last year's Super Bowl to help you coordinate staffing this year. With comprehensive restaurant scheduling software like SpotOn Teamwork, you can easily compare your staff schedule with POS data to see if you were staffed efficiently. From there, make changes accordingly to ensure you're appropriately staffed. If you don't have data at your fingertips, talk to management and staff who were on hand last year to assess whether you're appropriately staffed or need to adjust this year.
- If you expect the dining room or bar to be packed, make sure you have enough front-of-house staff, and make sure they're fully trained on your Super Bowl promotions and any special menu items or deal you have going.
- To reward servers and bartenders for working on game day (and encourage top performance!), set up a sales contest with a bonus for whoever does the best job upselling high-profit items.
- Make sure your back-of-house is ready to go. If you have a lot of pre-orders for takeout or expect a high-volume of online orders on game day, have the kitchen staff prep well in advance of kickoff.
- Who's coaching your team on Super Bowl Sunday? Make sure the manager(s) on duty have a proven track record and are well prepared for a busy and stressful day.
4. Shine on game day with restaurant tech
With your staffing figured out, use technology to make sure you're setting your team up for a big win, particularly if you know you're going to be slammed with orders or be shorthanded.
- Use a digital waitlist app and restaurant reservation system to help manage seating if you're expecting a full house. It will help bring sanity to your host station and keep guests up to date with real-time wait times and 2-way texting.
- Equip your servers with a handheld POS system. This makes it easy for them to cover more tables and work more efficiently, with the ability to send food and drink orders straight to the kitchen from the table.
- Consider using QR codes to have guests order and pay right from their table. This frees up your front-of-house staff to deliver food and drinks faster and ensure guests are having a good time.
- Make sure your staff is well rewarded by presetting suggested tip amounts on your handhelds, QR ordering, and receipts. Then, streamline the tip management process with a solution like SpotOn Teamwork and DayCheck for quick, easy payouts.
- Set the pacing controls on your online ordering so that you can limit the number of online orders coming in and keep your kitchen from getting swamped.
5. Keep the momentum going
Creating a great experience on game day goes a long way toward creating customer loyalty, but don't leave it to chance. Again, technology can be a huge help here by making it easy to add all your game-day customers to the customer database for your restaurant
Once you've seamlessly collected email addresses from everyone, it's then a simple matter to reach out to them all year long with targeted marketing campaigns, whether it's for the next big event or to drive traffic on a slow Wednesday night with an enticing happy hour special.
