Trampoline Park Food Sales: $9.92 a Check-In, 34% of Revenue
In July 2026, the largest revenue category at Airtopia McAlester, a new indoor adventure park in Oklahoma with trampoline courts, a cinema and an on-site eatery, was not general admission. The park booked $82,893.25 from its combined concessions and eatery line against $62,116.21 from walk-in tickets. Food and drink outsold the gate by a third.
The operator, Lelantos Holdings (OTCID: LNTO), published those figures itself in an unaudited operating update dated August 13, 2026, together with 8,360 guest check-ins, 569 active memberships and 65 booked parties. Very few active-entertainment operators disclose category-level revenue at all, which makes this one of the only public benchmarks for the food and beverage line in a trampoline park or family entertainment center.
This article converts that disclosure into per-check-in units, cross-checks it against the company’s second disclosure covering all five operating parks, and separates what the data supports from what it does not. The headline result: food and drink earned $9.92 per check-in, equal to 133% of the average walk-in ticket revenue.
If you are writing a pro forma, the food line is usually a guess. This is a real one, with its caveats attached.
1. The Largest Line at a New Park Was Not the Gate
Lelantos broke McAlester’s first full month of operations into six categories. The raw disclosure, reproduced exactly as the company published it, looks like this.
| Revenue category | July 2026 | Share of total |
|---|---|---|
| Concessions + Airtopia Eatery | $82,893.25 | 34.1% |
| General Admission | $62,116.21 | 25.6% |
| Cinema Tickets | $36,304.70 | 14.9% |
| Parties | $13,371.80 | 5.5% |
| Memberships | $10,655.24 | 4.4% |
| Arcade | $9,331.39 | 3.8% |
| Unattributed residual | $28,406.68 | 11.7% |
| Total park revenue | $243,079.27 | 100% |
Two things stand out immediately. First, the concessions and eatery line is the biggest bar on the chart, bigger than admission. Second, the six named categories add up to $214,672.59, which leaves $28,406.68 that the company did not attribute to any line. That residual is 11.7% of the total, and no public document explains what sits inside it.
Read the fine print: the release itself warns that “revenue categories may be presented through different operational reporting systems and should not be added together unless specifically identified as a combined total by the Company.” Every ratio in this article is a share of the reported total, never a sum of the parts. The residual exists precisely because the company declines to reconcile the lines.
Two of the other lines have already been analysed on this site. The membership line works out to $18.73 per active member per month, and the party line comes to $361.40 per booking. The food line is the largest of the three and, until now, the one nobody had converted into decision-useful units.
2. From Category Dollars to Per-Check-In Units
Dollar totals are hard to compare across parks of different sizes. Per-check-in units fix that, because check-in counts are published alongside the revenue. The conversion is a single division for each line:
Per-check-in revenue = category revenue ÷ guest check-ins, here $82,893.25 ÷ 8,360 = $9.92 for food and drink.
Running the same division across every category produces the second table.
| Revenue category | Per check-in | Index (GA = 100) |
|---|---|---|
| Concessions + Airtopia Eatery | $9.92 | 133 |
| General Admission | $7.43 | 100 |
| Cinema Tickets | $4.34 | 58 |
| Parties | $1.60 | 22 |
| Memberships | $1.27 | 17 |
| Arcade | $1.12 | 15 |
| Total park revenue | $29.08 | 391 |
Read the first two rows together. Every guest who walked through the door generated $7.43 of walk-in ticket revenue and $9.92 of food and drink revenue. The average check-in was worth $29.08 across all categories, so food and drink alone accounted for roughly a third of the value of a visit.
Combine the food line with the cinema ticket line and the picture gets stronger: $119,197.95, or $14.26 per check-in, comes from things guests buy after they decide to come. Jumping is the reason people drive to the park. Food, drink and a movie are where almost half the money changes hands.
Annualized at July’s rate, the park would carry 100,320 check-ins and about $994,700 of food and drink revenue per year. Treat that annualization as an illustration only, because July was the park’s first full month and summer demand is not a twelve-month average.
3. The Five-Park Reality Check: 19.3%, Not 34%
A single park in its first month is the least trustworthy benchmark in this industry. Opening curiosity, grand-opening promotions and summer holidays all inflate early numbers. Fortunately, the same operator published a second disclosure on September 4, 2026, covering July revenue across all five Airtopia parks then operating.
| Category (five parks, July 2026) | Amount | Share of total |
|---|---|---|
| Food & Beverage | $242,017 | 19.3% |
| Party Revenue | $199,202 | 15.9% |
| Membership Revenue | $160,361 | 12.8% |
| Cinema Revenue | $88,395 | 7.0% |
| Arcade Revenue | $67,963 | 5.4% |
| Total portfolio revenue | $1,255,964 | 100% |
Across five parks, food and beverage was $242,017 of $1,255,964, a 19.3% share. That is substantially lower than McAlester’s 34.1%, and the gap is itself informative.
Divide the portfolio figure by five and the average park carried $48,403 of food and drink revenue in July. McAlester alone booked $82,893.25. Subtract McAlester from the portfolio and the other four parks averaged $39,781 each, which means the new park ran the food line at 2.08 times the level of its established siblings.
Three explanations fit, and they are not mutually exclusive. First-month novelty is the obvious one. Second, McAlester is a hybrid box with a cinema, and cinema lobbies are concession machines; some of that popcorn revenue sits in the food line. Third, the company’s own caveat applies again: the portfolio release notes that category figures “represent components of broader reported revenue and should not be summed against total revenue unless specifically stated,” so the 19.3% share is a ratio of two disclosed numbers, not a reconciled accounting statement.
One number the portfolio release does not provide is a portfolio-wide check-in count, so a five-park per-check-in figure cannot be calculated. We state that openly rather than invent a denominator.
4. What the Menu Actually Sells
Category dollars say nothing about what a park should put on the menu. The official menu pages of the large chains, all published on their own sites, show a striking convergence.
Urban Air The official Urban Café page lists cheese and pepperoni pizza by the slice or as a full pizza, chicken wings and tenders, loaded waffle fries, popcorn, fountain drinks, ICEE frozen beverages and Dippin’ Dots, with food made fresh on-site and menus that vary by location. The café opens when the park opens and sits separately from the attractions.
Air Madness The park’s own FAQ describes a food court of nachos, pizza by the slice or whole, pretzels with cheese, cotton candy and soda, with spectators welcome at no charge. Air Madness also operates a full restaurant next door, a hybrid model that pushes part of the food revenue outside the ticket itself.
Sky Zone The Bakersfield park’s fall 2026 page advertises a member benefit of 20% off food and drinks, all season long. Membership is not just a play product; it is a food-frequency product too.
The bundle signal Urban Air’s New Tampa park page offers buyers of two Unlimited Play tickets a choice: two free tickets for later, or a meal for two consisting of two Dippin’ Dots and a whole one-topping pizza. The chain prices that two-person meal as equivalent in value to two admission tickets. Whatever the individual menu prices are, the company itself treats a pizza-and-dessert meal for two as being worth the gate.
The pattern across all four official sources is the same: frozen treats, fountain drinks and pizza anchor every menu, with popcorn, nachos and cotton candy filling out the snack shelf. These items share two properties. They need almost no preparation labor at the point of sale, and they tolerate long holding times, which matters enormously in a business where demand arrives in weekend waves and dies on Tuesday mornings. Airtopia, notably, does not publish its eatery menu or prices anywhere we could find, so the composition of its $82,893 line cannot be broken down further from public information.
5. The Cost Side You Can and Cannot Compute
Revenue is only half of the food decision. What does it cost to serve $9.92 per check-in? Part of that question has a public answer, and part of it does not.
What can be computed Staffing. The wage stack assembled in our earlier labor cost analysis still holds: the BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics program puts the median wage for entertainment attendants (occupation 39-3091) at $15.46, and the BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation survey puts the part-time benefit load at 1.25. That gives $19.33 per staffed hour. One eatery post, staffed across a 3,744-hour operating year (a 72-hour week), costs $72,389.
Spread over McAlester’s annualized 100,320 check-ins, one post costs $0.72 per check-in. Two posts, say a counter and a kitchen, cost $1.44 per check-in. Three posts cost $2.16. Against a $9.92 line, labor runs from 7% to 22% of revenue depending on how many posts the food program needs. Even at the top of that range, the line carries its own labor several times over before food cost is considered. Note the volume sensitivity: at half the check-in volume, the same post costs $1.44 per check-in, which is why food staffing has to scale with attendance instead of sitting fixed.
Scale the same arithmetic against a reference box of 31,512 sq ft (2,928 m²): the annualized food line of about $994,700 works out to $266 per open hour, which exceeds the roughly $209 per open hour that the same box pays in rent at the CBRE average retail rate. The food line, properly run, is bigger than the rent line.
What cannot be computed Food cost. Neither Lelantos nor any large chain publishes cost of goods sold for its food program, gross margin by category, or, in Airtopia’s case, per-item menu prices. The margin formula is simple, and every operator must fill in their own inputs:
Food margin = (food revenue − food COGS − food labor) ÷ food revenue, with COGS and labor supplied from your own supplier quotes and staffing plan, not from this article.
Be suspicious of any industry article that quotes a single food-margin percentage for trampoline parks. None exists in public data. What exists is revenue per check-in, and that is already enough to size the kitchen, the menu and the staffing plan.
6. What the Data Does and Does Not Show
This disclosure is unusually valuable and unusually fragile at the same time. Before you copy any number into a spreadsheet, note every limitation, including the ones the company states itself.
- Unaudited and preliminary. The release describes the figures as unaudited, based on management’s internal operating reports, and subject to final accounting review. Numbers can move.
- The company forbids summing. Both releases state that categories may come from different reporting systems and should not be added together. All shares here are ratios against the disclosed total, and the $28,406.68 residual is unexplained.
- First full month. July 2026 was McAlester’s first complete month. New-park novelty, opening promotions and peak summer demand all inflate the 34.1% share. The five-park figure of 19.3% is the soberer benchmark.
- The line is contaminated by cinema. “Concessions + Airtopia Eatery” merges the cinema concession stand with the restaurant. A pure trampoline park without a cinema would not replicate this composition, and the popcorn revenue is entangled with movie programming.
- Check-ins are undefined. The company does not state whether a check-in counts each entry, each paying guest, or each wristband. A member who re-enters may count twice. The per-check-in figures are therefore consistent within this dataset but not necessarily comparable to another operator’s definitions.
- No costs, no prices. No COGS, no category margins, no menu prices, no eatery square footage. Any margin claim built on this disclosure would be fabrication.
- One operator, one month, one market. McAlester is a small Oklahoma city. A park in a dense metro with high rents and higher wages will show a different mix. This is a single observation, not a law, and nothing here implies that food programs cause park success.
What the data does show, robustly, is one thing: at a real, newly opened, multi-attraction park, the food and drink line exceeded walk-in admission revenue, and across a five-park portfolio it held at roughly one dollar in five. That is enough to change how a pro forma should be built.
7. Decision Rules for Your Pro Forma
Forecasts are not on offer here. Decision rules are, and each one follows directly from a number above.
Rule 1: budget food at 15–20% of revenue, not as an amenity. The five-park benchmark is 19.3%. Anything above that is opening-burst upside, not a planning assumption. A park projecting $1.2 million in total revenue should carry a food line of roughly $180,000 to $240,000, and the kitchen that can serve it.
Rule 2: plan revenue per admission as gate plus food. At the McAlester mix, food and drink added 133% on top of walk-in ticket revenue. If your pro forma models $20 of gate revenue per admission, the visit is really worth $20 plus another $9 to $10, before memberships and parties. That difference moves the break-even attendance floor substantially, because food revenue arrives with almost no incremental capacity cost.
Rule 3: staff the kitchen in posts, scaled to check-ins. One post costs $0.72 per check-in at McAlester’s volume. Design the food program so that posts scale with attendance rather than sitting fixed: two or three posts on a Saturday wave, one on a weekday morning. If food labor creeps above a quarter of the food line, the menu has drifted too far into made-to-order items.
Rule 4: split the P&L if you run a hybrid. Airtopia’s cinema and eatery share one concessions line, which makes it impossible to see which program subsidizes the other. If your box includes a restaurant, a cinema or an arcade bar, insist on separate category tracking from day one, or you will never know what each square foot earns.
Rule 5: treat member food discounts as acquisition spend. Sky Zone’s 20% member food discount has a break-even condition: the discount given away must be smaller than the margin on the incremental food purchases the discount causes. On the cost side that is member food visits × average basket × 20%, set against incremental margin on the other side. If members were not going to buy food anyway, the discount is pure cost.
| Your situation | Planning number to use | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Writing a first pro forma | Food at 15–20% of total revenue | Five-park portfolio benchmark; first-month figures run hot |
| Pure trampoline park, no cinema | Food at the low end of the 15–20% band | The McAlester line includes cinema concessions of unknown size |
| Hybrid box with cinema or restaurant | Food can exceed walk-in gate revenue | McAlester food was 133% of gate; cinemas feed the line |
| Sizing kitchen staff | Posts scaled to check-ins, at $0.72 per check-in per post | The same post costs $1.44 per check-in at half the volume |
| Membership design | Food discount only with a repeat-visit mechanism | 20% off is a marketing lever, not a revenue lever, unless visits rise |
8. Three Things You Can Do Today
1. Rebuild the revenue tab. Take the food and drink line out of “other revenue” in your pro forma and give it its own row at 15–20% of total, with a per-check-in figure you can defend. If you want a second opinion on the rest of the revenue stack, our design-to-delivery process includes an operator-level revenue model for your floor plan.
2. Choose the kitchen format before the floor plan. A counter with frozen treats and fountain drinks needs one post and almost no back-of-house. A pizza kitchen needs two or three posts, a ventilation hood, and health-department sign-off. The format decision changes the labor math in Section 5, and it is far cheaper to make on paper than during fit-out.
3. Demand category-level benchmarks from whoever sells you a park. Ask any operator or supplier quoting you a revenue projection to split admission, food, parties, and memberships into separate lines with their assumptions shown. The Airtopia disclosures exist precisely because a park that shows its category lines can be checked. Our earlier read of the same operator’s numbers shows how much a single month of category data can teach.
FAQ
How much revenue does a trampoline park make from food and drinks?
The only category-level public benchmark comes from Airtopia McAlester’s July 2026 disclosure: $82,893.25 in one month, or $9.92 per check-in, which was 34.1% of that park’s total revenue. Across the operator’s five parks, food and beverage ran at 19.3% of revenue. A first pro forma should budget food at 15–20% of total revenue and treat higher figures as opening-year upside.
Is food more profitable than admission at a trampoline park?
Food revenue at McAlester exceeded walk-in admission revenue, $9.92 against $7.43 per check-in. Profitability is a different question: no operator publishes food cost of goods or category margins, so a profitability comparison cannot be verified from public data. The safe claim is about revenue, and the margin formula is food revenue minus food COGS minus food labor, divided by food revenue.
What food should a trampoline park menu include?
The official chain menus converge on pizza by the slice, chicken wings and tenders, loaded fries, popcorn, pretzels, fountain drinks and frozen treats such as ICEE and Dippin’ Dots. The common thread is low preparation labor and long holding times, which fit a demand pattern of weekend waves and quiet weekdays. Made-to-order kitchens add labor posts that must be justified by check-in volume.
How many kitchen staff does a trampoline park food program need?
Using the published wage stack of $19.33 per staffed hour, one post staffed across a 3,744-hour operating year costs $72,389, which is about $0.72 per check-in at a park doing 8,360 check-ins per month. At half that volume the same post costs $1.44 per check-in, so the number of posts must scale with attendance, with extra cover for weekend and holiday waves. If food labor exceeds about a quarter of the food revenue line, the menu is too labor-intensive for the volume.
Should members get a food and drink discount?
Sky Zone advertises 20% off food and drinks as a membership benefit, and the discount makes sense only as acquisition spend. The break-even condition is that the margin on incremental food purchases caused by the discount exceeds the discount given away on purchases members would have made anyway. Track the member food attach rate before and after introducing the benefit to verify that it pays.
Sources
- Newsfile Corp. / Lelantos Holdings, “Lelantos Holdings Reports $243,079 in Unaudited Revenue for McAlester’s First Full Month of Operations”, August 13, 2026 — lelantosholdings.io
- Newsfile Corp. via Wapak Daily News, “Lelantos Holdings Reports $1.26 Million in July Revenue Across Five Airtopia Parks”, September 4, 2026 — business.wapakdailynews.com
- Urban Air Adventure Parks, “Urban Café”, official menu page — urbanair.com/urban-cafe
- Urban Air New Tampa, official park page with the two-ticket meal offer — urbanair.com/florida-new-tampa
- Sky Zone Bakersfield, “All in this Fall 2026”, official park page (member food and drink discount) — skyzone.com/bakersfield-ca/fall-2026
- Air Madness, official park FAQ (food court and dining) — airmadness.com
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025, Occupation 39-3091, Entertainment Attendants — bls.gov/oes/current/oes393091.htm
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Employer Costs for Employee Compensation, June 2026 release — bls.gov/news.release/eccec.nr0.htm