2026 Cocktail & Hospitality Landscape Report

Hi! Working with culinary/food industry partners, I always enjoy looking at reports from similar industries. Personally, I love the top sources by reach section and the what’s shaping the conversation. It was interesting to me to see online news still getting such a high number here. I’m curious if that was inflated by aggregators and others whose reach numbers always seem inflated to me. For example, you have 31.6T as your cumulative ‘potential’ reach. That would have all 8.3 billion people seeing these mentions about 3,800 times. What does stick out to me is that Reddit is also showing up so high in reach while other platforms add up to about 1%. Reddit’s numbers also seem inflated with reach. Is that accounting for everyone looking at every reddit and subreddit thread or just those individual posts?

I love the takeaways, and you have a lot of them in this report! The top 3 trends section are things we are seeing with classic recipes and also when it comes to hospitality in restaurants and quick service.

To me, the mentions support your story much more than your reach numbers. In my reports I tend to focus on the overall mentions and the ones out of those that really matter. There are many partners, stakeholders and others that use my reports for presentations to groups that only care about that reach number. For those groups, I include it, but I also try to add context to the other metrics to inform them why their attention should be on those other numbers and details. I think you did a fantastic job on that information, so if you need to include reach, do it, but I see your summary, The Landscape, at a Glance, only has mentions numbers at the top, and I appreciate that.

Love this, ​@Aisharodpr - thank you for sharing!

​@Will Swope brings up some great callouts. ​@Julie Murphy, ​@Sofie KH, or ​@laurencabrera any additional thoughs?

I find this a very interesting type of report. It’s actually something I could do as well to support the hospitality sector in our destination/city. So thanks for the inspiration!

The section “What’s Shaping the Conversation”, the trends and your perspective on them are, in my opinion, the most important parts of your report. They’re concrete points that are easy for them to understand and, as a result, they can effectively put them into practice.

As for the reach, I sometimes leave it out. It depends somewhat on who the report is intended for. If it were for our mayor, for example, or for the hospitality sector, I’d leave it out because it would be difficult for them to interpret without the necessary context. If it’s for an internal report to our communications department, though, I’d leave it in because they have the necessary knowledge to interpret it properly. So it really depends.

Hi Aisha, love that you put this out there and asked for real critique. That's exactly what this community is for.

What's working: your local "In practice" calls are the strongest part. "About eight outlets carry almost the entire local conversation" is something a bar owner could act on tomorrow. And Know → Make → Change is a great plain-language take on Input → Output → Outcome.

On making it decision-grade, I'd start with two questions: who exactly is reading this, and what do you want them to do once they've read it? Then the data has to become a story. I'm a fan of And, But, Therefore, the method Trey Parker and Matt Stone made famous (here's a great short explainer: https://perell.com/note/but-therefore-rule/ ). It makes you connect the dots, add a little tension, and land on a recommendation. Your report already has one in it:

Puerto Rico's bars are winning international recognition, AND news drives 77% of the attention. BUT about eight outlets carry almost the entire conversation. THEREFORE a bar that wants to be next should build those eight relationships before spending on social.

Now picture every trend built that way, plus the one number that would prove it worked.

On reach: Will's point on scale is spot on, and the mention and reach labels on page 3 and the one-page summary look swapped too, so worth a second look. Once the numbers are checked, reach gets interesting when you pair it with other figures. 326M potential reach for an island of about 3.2M people says this story travels far beyond Puerto Rico, which makes it a tourism story.