Product & Market Diversification

As a Corporate Catering business with cafes primarily in business centres we have seen our revenue fall by over 90% since the 'Work from Home' advice has been issued.

In the last 8 weeks of shut-down we have:

• provided over 1,000 lunches to NHS workers at The New QEII Hospital in Welwyn & The Lister in Stevenage
• supplied over 100 ready to re-heat meals, along with fresh fruit and other food items to those in need prior to the Council safety net being in place.

We are now turning our focus on to how we evolve as a business in order to have an improved business offering and to enable us to provide our staff with enough hours after furlough.  This project is focusing on 2 areas:

1)    Expansion into traybake production.  

We currently sell cakes, which we buy in from a wholesaler, through our cafes to customers.  Since we have skilled kitchen staff we have decided to look at bringing production of these in-house.  By doing this we will be able to provide staff with more working hours and in addition provide our cafes with an enhanced cake offering, since they will be selling freshly made cakes which will hopefully drive revenue and demand.  

In addition we will look to expanding the sales of traybakes to existing customers via our website.  Our website already has the functionality for customers to order a buffet, we will expand this offering to include the traybakes.  We are hoping that whilst corporate customers may no longer order buffets they will still be looking to provide sweet treats.  This will initially be within our Welham and Hatfield delivery areas but will look to expand as demand requires it.  

Initial marketing will be via our current email client list which has been built over a number of years as well as utilising the social media accounts of the cafes and the overall business to push these offerings.

2)    Expansion into the wholesale production of sandwiches.  

We sell grab and go sandwiches, salads, rolls etc through all of our cafes.  Prior to lockdown we bought the majority of these through an external supplier.  However, since we have plenty of staff hours to fill we have decided to move to making our own grab and go sandwiches etc from our main kitchen which we will then deliver out to our cafes.  We also intend to try to find other small local businesses who sell grab and go sandwiches to customers to see if we could be the wholesaler to them for the sandwiches, but also for the traybakes.

The money raised will be used to enable us to buy the specialised equipment required to produce the above offerings for sale out to customers at the required standards as well as to provide updated systems to support this.