FOODITUDE
Offering feel-good catering for London-based businesses, Fooditude deliver a fullfood experience serving healthy, delicious and sustainable meals. From office lunches to boardroom brunches, their 180-strong team offer a seamless catering experience based on their mission to ‘feed people happy’.
This month, we interview Fooditude’s Founder and Managing Director, Dean Kennett and Head of Strategic Growth, Cristina Covello on the journey to become Fooditude as we know it today, the impact of Covid-19, their continued commitment to sustainability and the things they love about working in the food and hospitality industry.
What’s the history behind Fooditude? How did you get into the food industry?
Dean Kennett: About 20 years ago, after working in hotels and restaurants, I moved over to contract catering. The hours were good but there was something missing. I just didn’t get the same buzz that I’d had when working in hospitality. So, I decided to start out on my own! But the contract catering market was, and still is, extremely difficult to penetrate and I quickly realised, to set myself apart, I’d need to start on winning small contracts and offer a door-to-door delivery service.
So, it was a case of knocking on doors across the City and asking if anyone wanted lunch. From there, word started to spread, and I began transporting food to offices that didn’t have on-site catering facilities such as law firms and stockbrokers. Then, the big break came in 2014 with Yahoo!. As a trial, they asked us to deliver 400 lunches. The next thing we knew, we were doing it every day. We were up against some big contractors, but…we won the gig! Looking back, that was our first real foot into the tech world.
You started out as Just Hospitality and then rebranded to Fooditude. Can you tell us more about this journey?
Dean: Yes, in the early days, we were called Just Hospitality. After previously being called Eat Me, I was sat with a potential client and when she asked what we were called, I was too embarrassed to say! So, I replied, “Well, we just do hospitality.” And she said, “Wow – what a great name. It does what is says on the tin! Just Hospitality.” And, from there, it stuck!
Cristina Covello:
Then, in 2018, we decided to rebrand. We felt Just Hospitality didn’t represent the business anymore. So, we worked incredibly hard on steering the rebrand over to Fooditude, which we felt better reflected us as a business and the customers we serve. We went live in early 2019 with a new name, logo, look and feel – the works!
How did the pandemic affect your business?
Cristina: Well, most of our customers are in the tech sector and as Covid broke many firms went from 100% occupancy down to 5-10%, literally overnight.
Dean: We had brand new kitchen facilities that were now standing empty, which was just heartbreaking. So, we decided to not let it all go to waste and use it to help feed the community around us. We began working with housing associations and charities – including the brilliant Sam Vacciana, founder of Bermondsey Employment Skills & Training (BEST) – and quickly built an army of volunteers. We started receiving all types of food donations. The craziest was a delivery of over 20,000 mini cheeses which we used – and the team painstakingly individually unwrapped! – to make cheese sauce. We even enlisted the help of the fire service who delivered the meals in their firetrucks.
We also used the quiet period to review things internally. Innovation and development got underway including a complete overhaul of our menus because I was absolutely determined we would come back stronger and better than before.
Do you think the sector is now back to, or even busier than pre-pandemic times?
Dean: Workplaces are definitely back albeit in a hybrid form. However, with our model, it doesn’t really matter if teams are in the office on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday or just Monday and Friday. We work with our customers to plan across the week, which lets us capture patterns and plan our menus accordingly.
Cristina: We’re incredibly passionate about bringing people together over a good meal which is something that has helped our customers encourage their teams to come back into the office whether in hybrid form or full-time.
What do you think the advantages are of delivering pre-prepared meals to the workplace vs. running a client’s kitchen on-site?
Dean: If I think back to my days when I was a chef manager and when I went on holiday or if I was off sick, a relief chef would take over. Then, when you got back, you’d be hit with a barrage of complaints! This doesn’t need to be the case anymore. Today, a central production kitchen/unit can have five or six head chefs and the same number of sous chefs, at any one time. Plus, a development team and a director of food. That’s a lot of people in one space, overseeing the quality of the product. While that doesn’t necessarily negate all issues, it does ensure consistency. And when, like us, you are delivering over 3,500 meals daily across London, it’s essential that every meal tastes great.
How do you plan, prep, cook and deliver restaurant quality food? You must have a very slick operations team!
Dean: Well, end-to-end management is critical. There are a lot of operators that use third parties to deliver the food. But by managing everything from start to finish, you retain complete control and can turn things around quickly. When you rely on a contractor it can leave you exposed to risks and that’s where things can go wrong.
Cristina: In terms of delivery, on our busiest days, we can have up to eight vans out on the road at any one time. When we first started, we were delivering in black cabs! Today, however, we’re up to eight vans – one of which is electric.
We know your operations are incredibly committed to sustainability. Can you tell us more on why that’s so important to you, as a business?
Cristina: Sustainability is paramount to everything we do. For the past 10 years, we have been members of the Sustainable Restaurant Association and Planet Mark for five years. Last year, we reduced our carbon emissions per meal by 30%, which is partly due to how focused we are on reducing waste and becoming more energy efficient.
We’re also London Living Wage accredited and have a longstanding relationship with Highshore School in Camberwell, a secondary school for students with complex mixed needs. We’re incredibly proud to say that, since 2013, we’ve welcomed over 25 work placement students from the school, hiring three into paid employment.
Introducing the County Supplies Customer Series
Here at County Supplies, we’ve been supplying London’s leading chefs with fresh produce since 2005. Today, we’re proud to supply more than 600 customers – from schools and event caterers through to film sets and Michelin star restaurants – with over 2,500 produce lines including fruits, vegetables, dairy, dry and frozen.
Our new customer spotlight series showcases some of the UK’s leading chefs and explores the wide variety of customers they cater for, the importance of incorporating seasonal foods into their menus and their commitment to using only the finest fresh produce.
