Delivered-in Office Catering: its success depends on smooth running operations. But then again, what hospitality service doesn’t depend on all areas of the business running cohesively?
Every foodservice depends on good processes: from royal banquets at Buckingham palace, to the 2AM hotdog stand outside Brixton tube station.
But here’s the difference: operations in delivered-in office catering are centralised and work cohesively ‘as one’ across multiple sites. The magic happens when a busy central production kitchen, a reliable food delivery team, and an agile front-of-house team all play their part.
If you’re responsible for keeping employees well-fed at work, this article will help you understand how delivered-in catering makes your office foodservice a breeze.
Delivered-In Office Catering: Three Key Steps To Making It Work
To help you understand what efficient operations looks like, let's take a deeper dive into how delivered catering operations at Fooditude feeds office-based teams all across London.
This can be divided into three key areas:
- STEP 1: Kitchen and delivery
- STEP 2: Front of house and your canteen
- STEP 3: Operations and your bespoke service
Step 1: Understanding Kitchen and Delivery
The heartbeat of our operations
Providing solutions with size, quality and scale
Our central production kitchen (that we call “The Mothership”), is the epicentre of our activity, and provides us with the power to cook pretty much everything to any scale for our clients. Despite our kitchen’s large size and output, the way we cook is aligned to restaurant cooking rather than a bleak dystopia of ‘factory line’ food production.
Early in the morning, well before commuter-folk’s alarms go off, our team of chefs get to work preparing meals from scratch. This means every dish is made from fresh produce. We don’t take shortcuts with processed pre-made ingredients and rarely from frozen (our freezer space is TINY).
Scalability in the kitchen results in flexibility for our clients. Hybrid working has brought dramatic differences in office headcounts throughout the week. Delivered-in catering can help to mitigate the risks of office numbers and food numbers being out of sync.
Our food programme solutions are particularly beneficial for companies in the following situations:
- Offices with onsite kitchens
When our clients have food delivered from an off-site kitchen instead of having an in-house kitchen, the challenges of fluctuating headcount are easily managed. In other words, delivered catering removes the pain of operating an on-site kitchen on low occupancy days.
Added Value: Prime office space in city centres doesn't come cheap. Many of our clients have scrapped their on-site kitchen and transformed it into larger dining areas, break-out spaces or meeting rooms.
- Offices using food aggregators
Clients with smaller offices wouldn't dream of setting up an on-site kitchen. Before Fooditude, they opted for aggregators like Just Eat for Business. Time and time again, the Fooditude Team has heard the same old thing when consulting with prospective clients: aggregators let them down.
Using a caterer with a central production kitchen results in reliably fresh and consistently high-quality meals, delivered on time.
Delivery
We don’t just make our own food from our central production kitchen; all our deliveries are made by Fooditude too. We don’t use any 3rd party delivery services which means that we control delivery end-to-end.
Aggregator services often use external delivery services leaving workplaces dealing with the dread of orders being mixed up or late. Who needs that when hungry workers are minutes away from their lunch hour?!
We’ve heard complaints about aggregators ‘on the grapevine’ within office management. Hearing these issues inspired us to write a blog about how the aggregator model often falls short in feeding teams at work—read it here.
Our delivery is simple: everything comes from one kitchen. Chefs, a logistics manager and the driver team work together to ensure everything is just what the client ordered, before it goes out in temperature controlled containers. Checks are in place to ensure reliability, and we’ve yet to miss a single meal drop.
One final factor that makes delivered catering reliable is the dedication and teamwork of our committed drivers. The driving team are the “in-betweens” between our kitchen and client sites, with strong relations with both our chefs and our clients security teams. With organisation and teamwork, delivered-in catering is something that London workplaces can trust.
Travis, Fooditude’s Logistics Manager, gave a helpful overview of what he and the driving team get up to:
“Basically it’s up to me to check that all the driving routes make sense in advance: especially with events based at new locations. Room for error needs to be kept to a minimum - everything must always arrive on time. It’s up to the drivers to get the job done, and I’m here to coordinate their hard work.
The driving team has lots of additional responsibilities, checking food temperature before delivery is one. In the case of an emergency, like if a client ran low on a certain dish or equipment is urgently needed, the driving team makes the extra drop offs. The team’s adaptability to tackle challenges creates a service that our clients can depend on”.
Step 2: Front of House setting the scene in your canteen space
Where the catering comes to life
The Change Over
Our operations are like a winning relay race (maybe we have the Olympics on our mind, but it’s true!) Once the kitchen team and drivers have got the food over to your workplace, it’s time for our front of house to shine.
For smaller offices, this may be a team of one catering supervisor, but for larger offices - we hire a full team of dedicated front of house members. Whatever our client’s unique staffing needs, our front-of-house operations offer incredible value to their canteens.
Our front of house team is honed in on their tasks, ensuring a lightening-speed and smooth preparation for lunch service. Once the food is received from the drivers, our front of house staff get to work decanting and displaying the buffet. The meals are indistinguishable from cooked on-site food.
Our front of house maintains high standards for every breakfast, lunch and dinner service. We use digital software to check and monitor our food safety and health & safety, from probing food in temperature checks to ensuring everything is clean and ready to go. Everything is accounted for.
During service, the team maintains a helicopter approach to maintaining high-standards, always keeping a lookout for what’s most important: from restocking depleted dishes to helping diners navigate our extensive menu.
Dependable dietary and allergy information
Most importantly, there is signage clearly stating allergy and dietary information, along with a QR code which takes diners to a page listing ingredients and nutritional data. Weekly menus are accessible to diners in advance - with filters to remove dishes that don’t fit their dietary profile (check out this week’s live menu).
We offer clients a peace of mind with transparent dietary and allergy approach. Moreover, everyone who works front of house is fully trained in Health and Safety (Level 2) and Food Allergens. Catering managers also receive additional training on food safety to ensure diners are properly protected.
Alex, General Catering Manager at one of our larger clients sites, comments:
“My team is always on it. What I would say is most important to us is ensuring that the diversity of the food offering is properly displayed. It needs to be well presented, clean and tidy. By setting everything up well, we reduce queue times and impatient diners. Every week we hold a large team meeting to keep everyone engaged, informed and prioritised”
Adding even more value: some of our front of house staff even take up fire marshal duties to keep your office safe in the event of a fire evacuation.
How do we support our front of house to give the best possible service?
We keep our front of house team focused on what really matters: ensuring that diners are getting the best experience. Tasks that have traditionally fallen on catering managers and supervisors are delegated to other departments in the company.
Our catering managers and supervisors are entirely focused on the customer experience. For our contracted clients that means no P&L responsibilities, and all HR, marketing and financial functions are controlled centrally. We free up our catering managers’ time so they can get on with what they’re best at: customer service.
Our operations team works closely with the front of house team to tackle challenges together, from optimising staffing to helping maintain a high standard every time a diner visits the canteen.
Hospitality can be a challenging industry to work in, but Fooditude works hard to ensure that we provide our front of house (and all other employees) with everything they need to be happy and thrive. We are a London Living Wage employer, and all employees are automatically signed up to Hospitality Action - with great benefits including 10 free therapy sessions.
We also have initiatives like our occasional ‘Fri-Yay’ Fridays, where we give managers a budget to reward team members in a meaningful and personal way: from going out for cake to cookbook favourites.
Happiness IS the secret ingredient for great front of house teams. With our active HR initiatives and carefully nurtured company culture, we can promise a happy front of house team that is engaged, proactive and friendly with your diners.
Step 3: Operations and your bespoke service
An eagle eye on making our client’s food programmes a success
Monitor, communicate, review, and refine. Our operations team keeps an overview on how all aspects of our service fit together. Every one of our clients’ offices has its own unique systems, culture and priorities - and our operations team are here to ensure smooth running at each site.
Each operations manager is only responsible for a handful of clients that regularly visit and touch base with. Operations managers open up a space for honest and transparent feedback with the client, which can then be relayed back to the front of house team.
Operations teams ensure the client is getting continually good value and that our service is meeting and exceeding their expectations. Our ops teams work with the client on setting and reaching KPIs specific to their needs. If you’re a contracted client you can expect weekly visits, monthly meetings and quarterly business reviews as part of our ops service.
Further Reading: A Day in the Life of Fooditude
An infographic is worth a thousand words - and we have one that gives a simple overview of how Fooditude works on a day-to-day basis.
So here it is. Check out the process we use to feed thousands of London’s busy workers from one kitchen:
Conclusion
The success of delivered-in office catering hinges on the seamless integration of multiple operational facets, each playing a crucial role in delivering a cohesive and efficient service.
From the central production kitchen to the dedicated delivery team and agile front-of-house staff, every component is meticulously coordinated. We work hard to provide our clients with a sense of security and confidence that delicious menus are provided with reliability.
By centralising production and delivery, clients can enjoy the benefits of scalability, dependability, and creativity. Everyday, food should be fun and wholesome.
Get the catering model right means less foodservice issues to screw up your day, on top of a truly exceptional food experience for your team.
Speak to delivered catering experts: We get it, you’re probably not looking for a new caterer right now. But if you like the sound of how we feed teams, we’d be thrilled to provide more bespoke advice on the potential for your workplace canteens and mini-kitchens.
We aren’t super salesy. We’re here when you need us and happy to chat.
Want to learn more about our delivering-in office catering? Enquire now.
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