What next for M&B?

Mitchells & Butlers' (M&B) skill at running pubs has long been regarded as among the best there is. If not the best. Even the highly public - and potentially damaging - strategy bust-up late last year between its then-senior management and shareholders including the billionaire Joe Lewis did little to change this view.

The group's latest figures suggest it still knows how to run pubs, albeit that it has fewer of them. M&B believes it is making even more headway towards becoming a food-led operation, pointing to the ongoing decline in drinks sales as part of its rationale. With nearly half of its sales accounted for by food, this claim appears to ring true.

It's not all peaches and cream, however. M&B's move to operate more sites located in leisure and retail parks is bold, but not exactly novel. And while it plans only 150 or so over the course of the next three years — out of an estate of less than 2,000 pubs — that's still a lot of development outlay. It will be at least 12 months before it gets to the point where a significant enough number of such venues can be held to account for the effort that's gone into them.

But as an M&B bod put it to me last week, "we know people like coming to our pub-restaurants. Why not locate them in places where people regularly come?" The group is also hoping the appointment of ex-Burger King executive Gary John as its director of property will help site location and development no end.

Will visitors to the nation's retail parks prove hungry enough to pile into a spanking new M&B pub-restaurant over one of Whitbread's established pub-restaurants? Time, as I've oft remarked before, alone will tell…