The Operational Checklist Restaurants Should Complete Before Football Season Starts

As football season begins, restaurants can quickly see weekend routines change. Dining rooms fill with fans, takeout orders climb around kickoff, and kitchens work through higher volumes of wings, fries, appetizers, and other game-day favorites. Those shifts can place added pressure on fryer capacity, cooking oil usage, staffing, and the processes teams rely on to keep orders moving.

For multi-unit operators, preparing for that demand means looking beyond the sales forecast and considering how each location will handle the operational impact. This checklist covers the areas worth evaluating before volume picks up, from identifying high-demand locations and pressure-testing fry stations to adjusting filtration schedules and reinforcing standard operating procedures.

Why Football Season Requires a Different Operational Game Plan

Most operators think of football season as a traffic story: more guests, more tickets, more revenue, and while that's true, it doesn't paint the whole picture. The season also changes what people order and how hard your equipment works. Guests lean into shareable, fried, crave-worthy food, and they want it fast and consistent, whether it's the season opener or a Week 12 divisional grudge match.

That combination of a menu shift toward fried items and an unforgiving demand for consistency separates football season from an ordinary busy weekend. A sales analysis of 30 NFL cities across every Sunday of the 2023 season even found wings to have a 25% increase in total items sold per week in season vs. out of season.¹

Fryers that coasted through summer will now run hot for hours, and every dip in quality shows up on a guest's plate, and increasingly, on their social media feed. The teams that treat preparation as a preseason discipline rather than a game-day scramble are the ones still standing in January.

1. Forecast Fried Food Demand for Peak Weekends

Wings, fries, tenders, mozzarella sticks, and loaded appetizers can see higher demand around game days, increasing the volume moving through the fry station over the course of a shift. Understanding which fried items typically see the largest increases, and when those orders tend to peak, gives operators a stronger starting point for planning fryer capacity, cooking oil needs, prep, and staffing before the season begins.

A report also found that 13 of 16 appetizer categories are growing, with fried varieties expected to gain share over the next two years.² That broader appetite for fried appetizers can make game-day demand even more important to account for when preparing for the season.

Pull at least eight to twelve weeks of point-of-sale history, break it down by daypart, and isolate item-level demand for your fried products. Use those patterns to estimate how much fryer capacity you'll need, how much cooking oil you'll move through, and where additional labor may be needed during peak periods.

Higher fried food volume also means higher cooking oil consumption. Building oil needs into the forecast can help locations maintain adequate fresh oil inventory while preparing for the additional used oil generated during busy weekends. Dependable Cooking Oil Delivery informed by real-time usage data can help keep supply aligned with those shifts in demand.

2. Identify the Locations Most Likely to Feel the Pressure

Once you have a clearer picture of expected game-day demand, look at how that demand is likely to vary across your restaurant network. Proximity to stadiums, regional fan loyalty, local college and professional schedules, and established game-day behavior can all influence which locations experience the biggest shifts in traffic.

The differences can be significant. In an analysis of restaurant spending across 30 NFL cities, Green Bay saw the largest increase during the 2023 season, with Sunday food spending up 27% compared with the offseason.³ For multi-unit operators, data like this reinforces the value of planning at the location level rather than applying the same assumptions across an entire market.

Use historical sales and item-level data alongside local game schedules to identify locations likely to experience the greatest demand. From there, adjust staffing, prep levels, fryer capacity, and cooking oil supply accordingly. A stadium-adjacent restaurant preparing for a rivalry weekend may require a very different plan than a location experiencing only a modest Sunday lift.

3. Pressure-Test Your Fry Station Before Peak Volume Arrives

Higher game-day volume can expose fryer and workflow issues that are less noticeable during a typical shift. Slow temperature recovery, inefficient station layouts, or too much reliance on a single experienced cook can quickly affect ticket times and food quality when orders start stacking up.

Before the season begins, pressure-test the fry station with expected peak volume in mind:

1. Check fryer performance. Confirm fryers can maintain and recover the appropriate cooking temperature as baskets move through during higher-volume periods.
2. Review the workflow. Follow an order from freezer to fryer to plate and look for unnecessary steps that could slow the station when tickets accumulate.
3. Cross-train the team. Make sure multiple employees can confidently run the fry station so execution doesn't depend on one person being available.
4. Compare capacity with your forecast. Use the demand projections you've already developed to determine whether existing fryers can realistically support expected game-day volume.

Include oil management in this pressure test. Higher throughput can introduce more crumbs and food particles into the oil and increase filtration needs, making Fryer Oil Filtration an important part of preparing the station for sustained game-day demand.

4. Reevaluate Your Filtration Schedule for Higher Throughput

The increase in fryer activity during football season may require locations to revisit their usual filtration schedules. Best practices recommend filtering commercial fryer oil at least once a day, with high-volume kitchens often requiring additional cycles, including after busy lunch and dinner periods.

Frequent filtration removes carbon, crumbs, and other particles that accelerate oil breakdown. During game-day service, when fryers may be processing higher volumes of wings, breaded appetizers, and other fried foods, staying on schedule can help extend oil life and maintain consistent flavor, color, and texture.

For multi-unit operators, the next challenge is knowing whether those schedules are actually being followed across locations. Restaurant Technologies' automated Fryer Oil Filtration and filtration monitors track each cycle and connect to the T.O.M. Portal, giving operators visibility into filtration activity across their restaurant network. That makes it easier to identify locations falling behind and address execution gaps while the season is underway.

5. Reinforce Standard Operating Procedures Before Volume Increases

Higher-volume weekends put established kitchen routines under more pressure, making the weeks before football season a good time to revisit fry-station SOPs with managers and crews. Procedures should be specific enough that employees across shifts and locations know exactly what is expected when the kitchen gets busy.

Review your SOPs and confirm they clearly address:

• Filtration: How often should oil be filtered, and does the schedule change during higher-volume periods?
• Fryer loading: How should frozen products and basket sizes be managed to support proper cooking?
• Splatter and moisture: What handling practices should teams follow to reduce unnecessary splatter and moisture around the fryer?
• Oil quality: When and how should employees evaluate cooking oil quality?
• Station cleanliness: What cleaning tasks need to happen throughout the shift and at closing?

Use pre-season training and manager check-ins to reinforce these expectations across locations, especially with newer employees or teams that may not have worked through a football season before. The goal is to give crews clear routines they can fall back on when tickets are stacking up and there is less time to troubleshoot in the moment.

6. Measure the Right Operational Metrics During the Season

Sales data can show which locations had a big weekend, while operational metrics help explain how their kitchens handled it. Keep an eye on:

• Cooking oil usage by location
• Filtration frequency
• Fryer performance
• Food quality indicators

Comparing these metrics across locations can help surface unusual patterns, such as one restaurant using significantly more oil than others experiencing similar demand. Restaurant Technologies' T.O.M. Portal brings this information together across locations and provides compliance alerts when performance falls outside established thresholds, giving teams useful insights to make adjustments throughout the season and plan for the next peak period.

Build a Game Plan That Lasts Beyond Football Season

The habits you sharpen for football season shouldn't retire when the confetti falls. The best operators treat the season as a proving ground for processes that pay off all year, including consistent filtration, disciplined SOPs, clean data, and dependable supply.

This is where Restaurant Technologies fits naturally into the plan. As the leading provider of Automated Cooking Oil Management for more than 45,000 commercial kitchens nationwide, Restaurant Technologies delivers a hands-free, closed-loop, full-service solution built on 25+ years of expertise.

Total Oil Management combines dependable fresh oil delivery, automated Fryer Oil Filtration and Monitoring, and safe, hands-free Cooking Oil Disposal of used oil, which refinery partners then convert into biofuel. The enclosed system eliminates JIBs and messy Oil Rendering Tanks and removes a genuine safety hazard from the back-of-house, since deep fat fryers are the number one cause of burns. Meanwhile, web-based monitoring through the T.O.M. Portal gives operators the operational visibility and the data-driven insights to run every location with confidence.

Football season rewards preparation. Complete this checklist now, lean on automated cooking oil management to hold quality and safety when volume peaks, and you'll build a back-of-house that performs long after the final whistle.

Sources

1. Toast. Most Popular Game Day Foods and Drinks in NFL Cities this Season. https://pos.toasttab.com/blog/on-the-line/nfl-cities-food-alcohol-trends.
2. Circana. Order Up: How Shifting Lifestyles Are Shaping Foodservice Trends. https://www.circana.com/post/order-up-how-shifting-lifestyles-are-shaping-foodservice-trends.
3. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). Young Worker Safety in Restaurants. https://www.osha.gov/etools/young-workers-restaurant-safety/cooking.