TendedBar Debuts In NCAA Stadiums At Texas, Texas A&M

With 200 liters of liquor tucked neatly away in a TendedBar, the modular beverage dispensing company has proven it can handle the crush of an NFL halftime or a Taylor Swift tour stop. Now TendedBar takes its service to the NCAA, launching this season at Darrell K Royal Texas Memorial Stadium for the University of Texas and Kyle Field at Texas A&M.

“The NCAA is an untapped market,” Justin Honeysuckle, TendedBar CEO, tells me. “It is a perfect fit to wheel a mobile machine in and take an area that was unutilized before and transform it with liquor.”

Started as a Purdue University project by Justin’s brother and with early investing from Mark Cuban—he has since been bought out—TendedBar handles the throughput demand of major arena and stadium events by automating made-to-order cocktails. Already a mainstay in multiple NFL stadiums, the company will serve the 2023 season at Jacksonville’s EverBank Stadium (the company’s first NFL stadium in 2021), Charlotte’s Bank of America Stadium and one more NFL venue. They are also in MLS in Los Angeles at BMO Stadium and in the NBA.

Each location—which can be mobile—is 10 feet long and can hold up to 10 different liquors or wines at 20 liters each, a total of 200 liters of beverage, all mixable on site. “We actually do a fresh cocktail,” Honeysuckle says. “We are really curating your own cocktail.”

Fans can walk up to the bar and sign in with facial recognition—Texas A&M will not be using the facial recognition feature—that stores a customer’s information and credit card. That means, a one-time registration of the service is good for any TendedBar location. From there comes the cocktail making.

“Others have tried to dispense cocktails before, but nobody has done it the way we are doing it on the technology side,” Honeysuckle says. With a keg-based system, there’s no changing out of bottles. He calls it more of a set-it-and-forget-it type of system. Recently in Denver, TendedBar sold 900 drinks in three hours during a Swift concert and all that needed monitoring by staff was ice and cups.

“If you have to restock Tito’s because you went through 20 liters of Tito’s, that is a good problem for one bar to have,” Honeysuckle says, noting they do keep reserve kegs on hand if they expect to run out.

Each bar comes customizable for both the customer and the operator. Honeysuckle says it is venue-specific on what options they want to offer and can change depending on the event. With a mix of vodka, wine, rum, tequila, gin, soda, lemonade and juices, they can create the vast majority of cocktails. Each digital menu offers up a Tended Trends of suggested cocktail mixes to speed things along and offer quick menu selections of drinks that have proven most popular (for example, a Jack and Coke option is often on the suggested list), but customers can customize how they desire.

This in-bar mixing also allows teams to create specialty drinks for events. Recently during a Jacksonville Jaguars preseason game on a warm day, the team created the Teal Lemonade that offered a mix of blue curacao, ginger ale, lemonade and vodka together in a teal-colored lemonade drink.

“I truly don’t care what you put in it,” he says. “Everything is still made in your glass.”

While TendedBar can build out permanent spaces, the semi-mobile bar has proven the most popular. The company has grown on the PGA Tour, popped up at Formula 1 in Austin and made appearances in Allegiant Stadium during the NFL’s Pro Bowl in Las Vegas.

At the University of Texas, the school plans to use the bar outside of the home football games, moving it to other athletic events throughout the year.

The most popular locations within a stadium, Honeysuckle says, are the highest traffic areas seeing the most congestion at a bar. Serving 35 customers in five minutes at one bar is meant to improve the fan experience. “It is best suited for where you know you always have a line and you know people are there buying,” he says.

Drawing repeat customers improve the speed even more, as fans have already completed the sign-in process and can quickly get a second drink.

Honeysuckle says the company wanted to prove itself in the arena and stadium space. “If we can do an NFL halftime and the stress of that, we can probably do anything,” he says. “It gave us a nice use case. It might be 20% of our long-term strategy, but it showed that if we can handle this kind of crowd, we can probably handle the happy hour rush at a bar, nightclub or airport environment.”

Each bar can also get wrapped by a sponsor, both from a physical sense and on the digital screens. At Texas A&M, the debut includes sponsored bars with Twisted Tea, Madam Pelata, Archer Roose Wine and TX Whiskey.

With 200 liters to work with, TendedBar is taking its stadium business from the NFL to the NCAA and plans to handle the Texas-sized interest.