Dubai's drink academy

MMI Bar Academy beverage training manager Junaid Malik.

HME.com’s Ben Watts visits the MMI Bar Academy to find out how the training facility is educating Dubai’s bartenders and improving standards throughout the emirate’s beverage industry.

An all too often-made complaint made in many of Dubai’s F&B outlets singles out the lack of good and coherent service.

Beverage supplier MMI is attempting to reverse this and in January this year opened its first dedicated bar-education facility in Dubai.

MMI Bar Academy beverage training manager Junaid Malik says that the academy has gone from strength to strength since its launch at the beginning of the year.

“In January when we started we were full, but we were doing one session a day,” explains Malik. “Now we’re doing two to three sessions a day.”

Malik says despite the evident increase in interest in the facility, operating the centre during a downturn has proved to be a testing challenge.

“Hotels are struggling to sell alcohol and they are realising that training is such an important tool to get staff selling certain brands more,” he notes.

One of the big advantages the Academy’s offers hotels and outlets, is that they no longer have to rely on bringing beverage experts from abroad to the region to pass their knowledge onto beverage staff.

“It’s better and a lot cheaper than flying someone in for training sessions,” Malik states.

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With a downturn to contend with training continues to play an important role as bars try to increase their sales.

“Training is something that always matters, whether we’re in a recession or not; especially with all the new hotels opening, staff still need to be trained,” he asserts.

HME.com recently visited the facility for a training session on three Jack Daniel’s products, part of one of the academy’s recent brand-based training programmes.

“On average we’re getting around 65-70 bartenders to each session,” reveals Malik, who has to go through several channels before getting the message out to bar managers who might have an interest in sending their staff to the academy’s sessions.

“We first of all contact all our sales managers, who then forward it on to the key account managers; they then send it out to the F&B managers and all the different hotels they look after,” he explains.

“They will basically respond with a list of names and we take the first 70 names that come back so that we’re not selective.”