Both of the main mid-market brands at Mitchells & Butlers – Toby Carvery and Harvester – have now started serving takeaway meals from each and every site. It’s an entirely sensible development given how big the take-home market is. Until now it’s been dominated by Asian and quick-service operators with pub companies not even competing.

Now M&B has decided to drive hard into this sizeable market. The company has gone from a small trial to a full-blown estate offer in about a year. Early trading at Harvester has been promising on the takeaway front with meals served quickly climbing to 10,000 a week – a less-than-shabby estimated incremental sales boost worth £60,000-a- week or £3m a year. Family dining cousin Toby Carvery followed suit this month with a full-blown estate-wide offer.

Both brands are firm family favourites in the Charity household and so it was I set about testing both takeaway offers in the past week. The consensus view was clear with Harvester voted a clear winner with some reservations over the takeaway at Toby.

The main parts of the Harvester offer lend themselves pretty neatly to takeaway. At my local Haywards Heath branch two visits were painless.

It helps that once you’ve placed your order there’s something to do – go and build a salad at the salad cart. Customers are provided with Tesco deli-style transparent containers to fill with salad. By the time the right amount of love and attention has been poured into this, there was little more than five minutes to wait until the half spit- roast chicken is delivered. M&B supplies sturdy brown bags for carrying your hot main and salad home.

The main course is neatly packaged in an entirely adequate designed-up box. Arriving home, the salad was still chilled and appetising while the chicken remained piping hot. Surveying our kitchen post-tucker, family thumbs were turned upwards. We’ll be takeaway regulars, not least because it’s great value at £6.29 all-in.

Over at Toby in Crawley, even at 5.10pm on a Sunday afternoon the carvery queue was daunting. It took 20 minutes to get to the deck – in a carvery queue, it’s a scientific fact that every minute you wait feels like five. At the deck, chef supplies a cardboard box into which he carves your meat and then customers load-up on the vegetables. It’s only a qualified success. The box is far too flimsy –impossible to fasten in one case - and won’t take an awful load of top up-gravy.

By the time I go home, the contents of my boxes were a distance from what you’d call appetising. Still, staff report they’d knocked out eight or so on the Sunday I called in. And M&B only have to improve the sturdiness and heat retention qualities of their containers to get this one completely right. For now, you can see why the company went to full roll-out at Harvester first.

The first few times I met JD Wetherspoon founder Tim Martin I tended to ask him the same question but in different ways. How did you get away with turning the music off at your early pubs? Didn’t you get complaints from your regulars that the lack of music created a sterile atmosphere?  And so on. He always came back with the same hard-to- believe reply. I know that offering a wide range of cask ales at bargain prices was the engine of growth at JD Wetherspoon in the 1980s when London pubs tended to be brewery-owned and limited in their cask range. So, Tim kept telling me in the bit I found hard to fathom, throwing a beer festival would pack-out his pubs and the music issue was quickly forgotten as they over-flowed with happy drinkers. Fast- forward to right now and it feels like Tim’s cask ale retail principle – offer customers a varied and unusual range – is being rediscovered.

The momentum in the direction of “interesting” beer is visible in the off-trade where Tesco reported a record December for quality bottled ales – ales sales were up 65% at one stage as consumers chose the drink to accompany food over the festive period. Tesco ale buyer Kathryn Clarke said: “More people than ever before now drink ale with their meals and the trend has helped drive sales to their highest level since the pre-lager days of the 1950s.”

There’s no doubt that swathes of pubs have cottoned on to cask ale as a resonating point-of-difference. And we’re seeing all sorts of variations on a theme as clever licensees think this one through.

Within the 5,000-strong Punch Taverns estate, where I provide a little public relations assistance, there are many great examples. At the Sussex Arms in Twickenham, the lessee, Twickenham Taverns, is competing very well against a couple of larger managed pub by offering 15 handpulls.

The Wall Heath Tavern, Kingwinsford, a Punch pub operated by local pub company, Inndividual Inns, has forged a unique relationship with a local microbrewery, Enville Ales. Signage at the pub trumpets Enville Ales and it sells five ales produced by the brewer alongside a range of five additional hand pumps that serve rotating guest ales.

Over at the Brandling Villa in Gosforth, licensee Dave Carr has gone one logical step further in terms of partnering a local microbrewery. 
He’s let Ouseburn Valley Brewery set up in his basement and he often nips down to request a particular short-run brew to add variety to his ale offer.

But perhaps it’s the licensee of Punch’s Green Man in Long Itchington, Warwickshire, Mark Carver-Smith has carried the beer festival to its ultimate iteration. He noticed that it’s a struggle to buy much more than a bag of crisps at the average CAMRA beer festival held in a village hall – yet customers turn out in their droves. In a remarkable piece of self-help, he teamed up with the other five pubs in his village to organise a four-day beer festival where each sells four or more different cask ales. Adding to the pulling power is each pub offering its own al fresco food plus live music (from folk to steel bands through to tribute acts), theatre performances, Morris dancers and all manner of additional entertainment. The upshot is 12,000 visitors over a four-day period in May. But, it’s the interest provided by 20-odd cask ales that’s the primary driver here.

It seems that barely a day goes by that another individual or multi- site licensee declares an intention to start brewing themselves. All in all, it amounts to a re-awakening in relation to the pulling power of a quality cask offer.

I have a morning ritual that I’m happy to tell you about. I drive down to our local petrol station, open 24 hours a day, to buy a newspaper and coffee. When I arrive at around 7am I normally have to join the end of a queue of people – invariably builders making an early start – to buy my Coffee Nation cappuccino. The sight of half a dozen people waiting to spend £2.25 to buy a coffee still strikes me as slightly surreal. It is a phenomenon that has a relatively short history. Good coffee has been widely available in a retail context for little more than a decade after all.

It’s an area of the market in exponential growth. The UK branded coffee chain market grew sales by 10% last year to hit an estimated turnover of £2.1bn, with the market doubling since 2005. A remarkable 600 new coffee outlets opened last year, around a dozen a week. One in ten people visit coffee shops daily and 39% of people surveyed by market specialists Allegra Strategies stated they visited coffee shops more often than 12 months ago.

To put this total spend in context, coffee shops now achieve a full 10% of the total annual spend of the entire 50,000-strong pub market.

There’s an obvious need for the pub sector to up its game on the coffee front. It’s an area where even the biggest players have struggled to get their offer right. A board director of a major managed pub company once told me that the main problem is one of finding the right degree of focus. With so many other moving parts in the mainstream pub offer, it’s an obvious challenge to provide the appropriate amount of training and development to ensure quality coffee is served every time. And then there’s the considerable cost, many thousands of pounds, involved in acquiring a decent coffee machine.

To be fair, there is a lot of progress being made. Kevin Sammons, of 46-strong Pub People Company, told me last week that the company has made real inroads on the quality coffee front. One unlikely pub in Lincoln, for example, racks up £1,000-a-week in coffee sales after the company invested heavily in equipment and Barista training.

But it’s still worth reminding ourselves of the size of the prize here. Overall sales in the branded coffee market are forecast to jump by a further £1.1bn in the next three years. At my local petrol station, a helpful employee tells me they sell more than 200 coffees a day during the week, producing £400 of turnover per day. Whitbread’s Costa Coffee arm was advertising just recently in magazines like Forecourt Trader and Convenience Stores, trumpeting the profit potential of one of its Coffee Nation/Costa machines. Stockists, Whitbread reported, could earn £40,000 a year in profit from renting one of its machines.

Coffee, like beer, is a product for which consumers will pay a premium, assuming it’s of the right quality. Like draught beer, good quality coffee isn’t available in the majority of UK homes. But the two products fall into the affordable treat category that consumers are loathe to give up even in the toughest of times. Makes you wonder whether the time has arrived for a quality accreditation body, like Cask Marque, for coffee in UK pubs.

There's an American eating-out research firm making its first foray into the UK market. Technomic, based in Chicago, has been watching the American market for 45 years and has just undertaken a survey of 1,000 UK consumers to test consumer attitudes to the pub.

And plenty of encouraging stuff emerged. For a start, the broadened pub offer is attracting more youngsters. A total of 52 per cent of young consumers reported they are visiting pubs more often than a year ago.

The survey also identified the increasing importance of food.

Consumers are nearly three times as likely to prefer food-led pubs over wet-led pubs. Technomic describes this as a "shift in consumer perception of pubs". Customers, according to the survey, want a mixture of the old and new in food terms – 64% said they prefer pub menus to feature a mix of traditional dishes along with contemporary options.

It's still not entirely about food yet, obviously. A chunky 29% of consumers reported that they regard an extensive beer list of "high importance".

But there's no doubt that pubs with a great value food offer are having a good recession. Last year, pub chains outperformed restaurants by around two per cent in every month with the exception of one. With larger sites and more scale in absolute terms, managed pub chains have been holding their price points and taking share from other parts of the eating out market as consumers trade down.

And there's plenty more business to go for. Pub meals, including drinks sold with food, account for some £9.8bn of a total market worth £45bn per year. Just three managed pub chains – Marston's, Greene King and Mitchells & Butlers – are investing a combined £227.5m in food-led pub capital expenditure this year.

Looking around the multi-site pub companies, it's possible to spot some very fast adaptations to align with the steady withering of beer as the primary driver of the pub experience. This week, I was talking to founder of Ever So Sensible Chris Bulatis. Chris, a former Mitchells & Butlers executive who was heavily involved in setting up student chain Scream, began his own company by opening a couple of cutting edge bars called Dogma. It was a firmly wet-led company – but Chris spotted the trends were heading in a different direction. In 2009, he set up a parallel company Ever So Sensible Restaurants to, essentially, balance his business out. Now at 11 sites, food accounts for 40% of total turnover - and 50% if you exclude the two original Dogma venues.

It's perfectly possible to make money at the wet-led end of the pub spectrum. But latest CGA figures show nightclubs numbers dropped 13% last year while food led managed pubs increased in numbers. It tells you all you need to know about where the real squeeze is happening.