Work AND PLAY
What we do in a nutshell
We develop strategic menus for adventurous, ambitious and collaborative restaurant teams and pioneer focused product innovation in line with our clients’ needs and values. We also create operational processes to drive standards, safety and profitability.
A taste of some work done
LEON NATURALLY FAST food
This year afforded an opportunity for some more long term work. Leon is a wildly successful UK brand in the first few years of digging their toes into the US market (always a bigger challenge than expected). The challenge was two-fold: first, help the team establish what “naturally fast food” means in the American market, providing a menu that uses minimal SKU’S, provides comfort food that is both nostalgic and relevant, within very tight margins. Secondly, execute that menu within brand constraints: Mediterranean, gluten-free wherever possible, always and only baked, quintessential and most importantly, craveable Fast Food. The successes in the execution of this project were many - the most exciting was the development of a custom gluten-free breading that gives you everything you expect from fried chicken, but baked. A range of sandwiches and snacks that really showcase the product, grounding the brand and giving it a clear and understandable offering make this a menu that ticks all the boxes.
Shouk Modern Israeli street food
The talented entrepreneurs of this 2-unit-and-growing eatery needed someone to be able to step back from the grind, and make an assessment of what operational procedures were needed in the business to grow with consistently applied standards. We assessed and developed these procedures. We trained and rolled out the new processes to make sure that all employees from management down to hourly, bought into the changes. Lastly, to monitor and drive success, we set up an auditing program to measure how well processes are being implemented, and to help them stick.
Nando’s Peri Peri Salad category relaunch
A little tired, we needed to align the salad category with our lunchtime competition. We researched consumer usage and buying trends, industry insights and benchmark competition to redesign the category from the ground up. The build of a salad was approached as a formula, to take into account today’s target market, food trends and eating behavior. This project was a huge success, increasing overall menu check average and increasing the volume of the salad category in the menu mix. We executed strategy, recipe development, ingredient sourcing, trial, roll out and training and food styling was done for this project while working for Nando’s Peri Peri.
Bailey's
This project was fun - one of our first. Dylan and I helped a couple start their catering, at home dining and ready-meal business by creating a website, food photography and retail meal packaging (design, regulatory content and printing). The business started off with a huge launch party which was a great kickstart to their business.
Nando’s Grocery recipe development
The brief was to tap into a specific user segment: Keto dieters, and to communicate the wide range of applications of the Peri Peri product range. We developed a range of recipes that could be used to target this demographic, with corresponding nutritional analysis, food photography and copy writing for optimum SEO.
The Office at Woodlands
Sometimes a project means less of the shiny and more of the digging in and getting the business right. When a colleague of mine and his wife retired and took over a restaurant in our office park, they took over an equipped kitchen, restaurant and full set of staff. They also had some money to invest, passion and time to put into their new project. They asked me to help them pin down their operations. We re-designed and simplified their menu, assessed their ingredients, recipes and stockholding and wrote cost recipes and systems that tied their P&L together so they could start to understand how much money they were making from each item. After that, we needed to re-engineer many items and get the business profitable. With one of the co-founders being an enthusiastic home cook, we started putting her dream into action - she played with what she wanted to serve, and we scaled the recipes up, costed them and made them feasible and profitable to execute at restaurant scale