Phil: I'm delighted to be joined by Ricky Towers from British Garden Centres, group director of the restaurants there. So he has a massive responsibility across the estate of ..."]

[00:00] Phil: I'm delighted to be joined by Ricky Towers from British Garden Centres, group director of the restaurants there. So he has a massive responsibility across the estate of British Garden Centres, and I think it'd be really interesting to dive into that and find out more. But Ricky, why don't we start by you just giving us a little bit of background about your life in catering? You told me a little bit before about where you started, and I was interested – we both started as kitchen porters. That was the end of my career in catering, but you carried on.
[00:30] Ricky: Thank you, Phil. Yes, so all my career has been working in hospitality. I started at 16 making pizzas for a guy called Alf, who taught me – that was the first bit, a few months doing that. And then I spent the next few years working in independent businesses, where I learned the real basics, the foundations of hospitality, and then moved into larger managed pub businesses. I did a few years working for Whitbread – six or seven years working for Whitbread all over the country – and then moved over to Spirit, as it was then. I worked my way through Spirit as an assistant manager, manager, area manager, or business development manager as they were called in the day, running about 20 pubs across Yorkshire and Lincolnshire. And then I joined British Garden Centres when it was a far smaller business, when there were only six sites.
[01:35] Phil: Wow. How times have changed.
[01:37] Ricky: Absolutely. And the reason for joining the business was that the family wanted to bring in some managed experience of managing group catering. So we did that for a few years, and then I stepped away from the business to do something else that I wanted to do. I went back to pubs for a little while, and then joined just at the time of the expansion, when we acquired the Wyevale estate, and I have been there ever since. So we took it from nine sites up to, I think it was, 58, and then we've progressively grown the business ever since.
[02:11] Phil: And so now British Garden Centres is over 80 sites. So just give me an idea about what it's like to run hospitality at that scale. What does that look like day to day for you?
[02:22] Ricky: I think it's really important that we're making sure that we're safe. That's going to be the common theme throughout all of this. So I spend a lot of time working on ensuring that we're doing the right things in the right ways at every opportunity. A lot of time as well working on developing the restaurants, but also making sure that the numbers are right, that the business is performing, and that the teams are on point, making sure those restaurants are delivering the numbers as they should be.
[02:53] Phil: Right. So what do you see centrally that maybe people on the ground don't see, and what do they see on an individual site that maybe you don't get to see?
[03:06] Ricky: If we take that in two parts – from a numbers point of view, we're really keen that managers within our business are commercially aware, so they are given insight into numbers. Sometimes in smaller businesses the numbers can be held quite centrally, but we really do share the performance, and managers see their performance every day: sales year on year, labour, et cetera. And the best way to describe it is that those numbers roll up throughout the day and are then presented in an overview that we get of the business every day.
[03:43] Phil: Okay. Yesterday I was talking with Alan Roper, and at Blue Diamond, benchmarking departments across the estate is really important for him. Do you do that, or something similar? So a restaurant within British Garden Centres can see how they're performing against comparable sites?
[04:02] Ricky: Absolutely. We tend to use that a lot on labour. Labour is our largest cost, and we use benchmarking, as well as other controls, to really talk about what should a restaurant of a certain size be performing like compared to other restaurants of a certain size. And I think that means people have that “the art of the possible”, what they could deliver, by seeing numbers that they can compare themselves to others within their peer group.
[04:35] Phil: So obviously garden centres have evolved tremendously over the last few years. How important is that food offering that you're providing in actually driving people to come and visit British Garden Centres?
[04:50] Ricky: It's been an emerging part of the market for many years now, and restaurants in garden centres are so much more than they maybe were 20 years ago, or maybe a little less than that, when it was a slice of cake and a cup of coffee in the corner. Now restaurants can be all sorts. They can be anything from a small coffee shop all the way up to a many-hundred-seat restaurant. And I think fundamentally dining in restaurants in garden centres is a really key part of the industry and the business. And at times of the year they really are the footfall driver in the business. When we're off season, January, February, or even as we are now, where the weather's been a little bit against the garden side of the business, restaurants have really helped maintain that footfall.
[05:39] Phil: And do you get involved in loyalty programmes within British Garden Centres to help encourage that footfall at certain times of year, when things might be a bit slower elsewhere in the garden centre?
[05:52] Ricky: Absolutely. We have a mechanic called Family Card within British Garden Centres, and that's a really key mechanic in driving loyalty. We recognise that people visiting the centres regularly should be rewarded for that, so they win and we win, because we get the data and we get them visiting more often. And actually, the restaurants are a great way of getting people to come in maybe more often, so we use that to hook them into the business.
[06:19] Phil: Right, excellent. So I can imagine that you have a loyal customer base that you're trying to manage – their expectations, what they want, the set tastes that they like. Obviously things are always evolving and you want to evolve your menu and what you're doing. So how do you balance keeping your customer base happy with evolving things and catering to new tastes? There are new trends coming along with food all the time, aren't there?
[06:55] Ricky: Absolutely. And the bit that's really important for me is to keep sight of what guests actually want. So you make sure that you have a really strong core offer. And then we use opportunities with specials, with offers, with some sites in different parts of the country, where we might decide to use some new tastes, some new flavours, bring them in and gauge what people like. But we also spend a lot of time making sure that we're aware of what other businesses outside of garden centres are doing. So it might be emerging flavours such as barbecue, which is really big at the moment. And we're not going to put a full barbecue menu on, of course not, but what we might do is take some of those flavours in sauces and garnishes, et cetera, and use them in our menus.
[07:50] Phil: You said there about doing tests and trialling things, so I can imagine that a lot of what you do is testing and seeing how it works. Tell us about some of those things – are there ever times when things haven't quite gone according to plan?
[08:11] Ricky: Absolutely. With the size of the business and the journey we've been on, there are things that we’ve liked, and where we've gone, "This will be a winner," and it's not worked. That can be testing, especially when you spend your time, when we cook the food and are going, "Right, is this right? Is this how we want it? Let's tweak it, let's get it right," and then we give it to other people to try and it bombs. I think the best one was, a few years ago, we brought a curled Cumberland sausage ring onto the menu.
[08:44] Phil: Okay.
[08:45] Ricky: They looked great, they tasted great, the plate looked brilliant with them on. Guests hated them. Absolutely hated them. Our teams struggled to cook them well, and with Cumberland sausages, unless you cook them very carefully they look a bit raw in the middle. It was one of those things where you kind of went, "Do you know what, that was a bit of a disaster." So you change the menu quickly.
[09:06] Phil: So with over 80 sites on the estate, different areas and different restaurants will be trying things, and maybe have different tastes, or the chef will prepare something in a slightly different way. How do you find out about the things that are working in a local garden centre restaurant that you can then take and use elsewhere in the estate? Or don’t you? Is everything controlled centrally?
[09:35] Ricky: It's a multifaceted answer. First of all, we're a core restaurant, so the menu is the menu, because you can't suddenly have 80 sites all doing different things – you lose control of your margins, you lose control of your safety and your allergens. However, we're really keen that the sites have some freedom. So within that, we've made a huge amount of specials and cakes, et cetera, that they can choose from to make their site their own. And we recognise that there are regional tastes: what may sell in the North West definitely won't sell in and around London. So we give them the ability to put forward suggestions for recipes, as long as we centrally control the ingredients and all those things, but they have the freedom to put on specials that they know will sell on their site.
[10:26] Phil: Okay. And we were chatting earlier, and you were saying to me that when you make a decision at head office about maybe changing a recipe or adding an ingredient, there's an impact that that has, because you're dealing with such big numbers across the estate.
[10:48] Ricky: Yes, it's something we spend a lot of time on. When we make those decisions, we model them fully. Even something like changing – I don't know, what was it? It was bread going from thick slice to extra thick. That change in bread was worth about 80,000 quid. So we make sure that whenever we make any decision on ingredients or change the spec of a dish, we model it. Otherwise the impact can be big money.
[11:19] Phil: And so, it must be quite tricky for you guys, to think about: “we want to control costs, but we've still got to think about the customer experience, and we can't pare things back so much that we're actually affecting that experience.” How do you balance that?
[11:38] Ricky: Well, first of all, you keep the fact that it has to be about customer service and the customer experience at the heart of what you do. You don't let the desire to deliver a set of numbers be so great that you make poor decisions. So we're always balancing that. What we do do is make sure we leverage our buying power, so that when we decide we want to do a dish, for instance, we buy it at the right price to be able to sell it at the right price. So as a business we hit our numbers, but from a guest's point of view, they get a great experience at a great price.
[12:12] Phil: I think this might be going back a little to what you were saying earlier about restaurants in the North East having a bit of control over what they put on the menu. But obviously with high street chains – McDonald's even – they've built their business on being able to replicate the same meal, so customers, if they go into one restaurant and then another, know exactly what they're going to get. With British Garden Centres you've got 80 sites. Do you try to create something where the customer will go, "Actually, I know what I'm going to get from a British Garden Centres restaurant"? Or do you give them a bit more autonomy?
[13:00] Ricky: Well, consistency is the golden fleece – it's the magical thing that everyone's looking for. So absolutely, we're really clear about making sure that people are aware of what the meal should look like. The spec – we make that we photograph it and we're clear with people that we expect it to be delivered a certain way, because it's good for everybody. It's good for the guests, they know what they're going to get. It's good for the business and it's good for the team. As much as there are people out there who are very talented and may decide to change the spec of a meal, it can inherently make it unprofitable or dangerous. So we have to make sure everyone is really aware of that, and therefore we're always feeding back on spec, we’re always checking, we’re always challenging, and always making sure they're doing it right.
[13:44] Phil: In your introduction, Ricky, you spoke about the expansion of British Garden Centres, and it's grown hugely, hasn't it? When you've been expanding like that, you're taking on sites which already have a catering operation in place. What are the things you first do to try to bring them in line with how British Garden Centres do things? Do you completely just stop and go, "Right, we're going to do it like this from now on"? Or is it a gradual process? What's the process that you take?
[14:19] Ricky: The first thing we do is get to know the site. So we tend to, when we're acquiring a business, that is a conversation that, most of the time, happens in advance, most of the time – sometimes it does happen at very short notice. We spend time building a relationship. We spend time with the kitchen teams and the management of the restaurant to understand what that's going to look like. We show them the menus, we might take them to a site to see the way we operate, and then we make decisions on each individual site. On the whole, we bring them into the business, and we make that change very quickly, because ultimately, to signify a change, you have to make a change. So if we want to bring them onto our menu and into the Garden Retreat brand, we need to get them onto our menus.
[15:00] Phil: When you say quickly, how quickly are we talking?
[15:03] Ricky: It can be day of acquisition, or within a day or two. Some of them can be a little longer, but we tend to try to make the change and move forward.
[15:15] Phil: Right. And how do you manage that with the teams there on site? Do you parachute someone in to manage that transfer?
[15:25] Ricky: Yes. We have a team of regional managers who work around the country, and they each have a group of restaurants under their control. They'll spend time with the team, and then we have a central team that may go along as well – menu development chefs, kitchen support, et cetera. So we drop in there and spend time with them, for a good while to make sure they're up to speed. We also bring managers from other sites, because as ambassadors we use them to talk about being part of British Garden Centres, and they'll deal with the things that we don't think about. They'll answer those questions that have completely gone out of our minds.
[16:05] Phil: Excellent. So with over 80 sites, you can't possibly visit each one and sit there and watch what's going on. Are there certain KPIs that you monitor across the estate, where you can tell there's an underperforming restaurant or café because they're not meeting certain indicators that you're tracking?
[16:26] Ricky: Absolutely. I do try to visit sites as much as possible, but even if you visit three or four a week, it still takes you a good few months to get around them all. So we have a framework of KPIs, systems and processes that we use to monitor the businesses: sales, sales versus last year, sales versus budget, labour – and within labour there's a whole host of metrics on that – and stock. Stock is something we probably manage to a greater extent than the average business, because we have the clarity of the system and the amount of information. But then we put in place things like safety inspections: we work with consultants to do unannounced visits, and they will turn up like an EHO and do unannounced visits. And then there's a whole host of other KPIs. We talk about complaints, we talk about feedback, positive reviews, the EHO score on the doors. We use them all together as a suite of measures to give an impression of what our site is doing.
[17:39] Phil: And are there other KPIs, or things you're focused on now that you might not have been focused on so much five years ago? Have things changed, and the way you look at things evolved?
[17:51] Ricky: Yeah, absolutely. We've definitely grown up as a business, everyone knows that. We've been like a piece of elastic: we stretched to get to the 58 or whatever it was, and then we've caught up with ourselves. Now that we've brought in systems, process and insight from an information point of view, there's far more ability for us to sense-check the health of a business by having that amount of data, where before it was done by being there and seeing it. Now we have a huge amount of insight that allows us to make those decisions. And as the world's changed, you become more aware of things. Allergens is one, for instance. They've always been important, but as we become more aware of that as a country, and as legislation's changed, we have to make sure we're ahead of those sorts of things.
[18:42] Phil: Right. And how does that affect you as a business, on such a large scale? Allergens is a big deal – I saw there was a talk about that on this stage yesterday, I think. From your perspective, not just running one restaurant but running an estate of over 80 restaurants, does the scale make it harder, or easier?
[19:17] Ricky: Well, it definitely keeps me awake at night. Nothing else does. And I will be very honest, we have to make sure that we're absolutely right, and then has to be multifaceted areas of control on that. So we make sure, from a buying point of view, we have to control our suppliers so they don't just suddenly make a change, because suddenly a product could be swapped from one to another and you then end up with an allergy exposure. We make decisions when we look at a product, so, what we tend to do is not willingly buy products with lots of allergens in them. We'll look at, say, the mayonnaise: does it have more allergens than it needs? Or is there a clean deck one that we can use? We try to steer ourselves towards products that help us make operating the restaurants easier. And then we talk about it a lot. We make sure we've got till systems that ask guests if they've got allergens. We've got systems like Ten Kites that allow us to control the data centrally. It's lots and lots of tiers of management and control.
[20:26] Phil: It is a very serious subject, isn't it, allergens? Because the worst thing, and you said it keeps you up at night, I can imagine the worst thing would be to have an incident over that.
[20:36] Ricky: Yeah, absolutely. And when you serve well over a million meals a year, a lot of the time we do everything we can possibly do, and sometimes people, through their own allergies, make poor decisions. We have to be constantly asking and checking to protect people, even against their own best will. People sometimes come in and go, "Oh, it's all right, I've got an allergy, but I'll eat it anyway," and you have to work on that and work with them.
[21:05] Phil: We talked a little bit about making a small change to an ingredient or a recipe, but presumably there are lots of other things within the site that you have control over, whether that's food waste or choosing suppliers. Can you give me some examples of where you've looked at something and gone, "Actually, we can save money here across the site"? It may seem like a very small thing for one restaurant but multiply that up and it's a whopping great big change.
[21:44] Ricky: Yes, absolutely. I think one of the most important ones is food logistics: getting the food from the right people at the right times, making sure we’re constantly moving our purchasing around so that we don't end up overpaying, you know those few pence extra can cost us a lot of money. Milk’s one for instance, where we watch keenly and move it between our suppliers. Then there are things like chemicals, and making sure our chemical suppliers are training our teams, because if you just miss the dilution rates on chemicals – given the number of bottles of sanitiser we make every day – those tiny over-portions can just roll and roll and roll. And then coffee, I suppose, is another one. Coffee is really important, but if you're not absolutely on top of calibrating coffee machines, and making sure grinders are in great condition and the teeth are not dull, those little bits add up to huge amounts of money.
[22:48] Phil: When you look at the wider catering business and the hospitality industry, what changes do you think are heading towards garden centres next? When you look outside of the industry, what do you see and think, "Actually, that's coming to us"?
[23:03] Ricky: Probably a couple of things, really. One, I think, is flavours. We are a core catering business, it is traditional food, so flavours tend to run a little behind the rest of your average restaurant and café. Some of those flavours will start emerging, maybe from Asia et cetera, those flavours will come, but a little later. But then I also think it's the use of technology, things such as self-ordering kiosks. It's not for everybody, but I do think there are people out there who actually really like apps, and it's something that maybe garden centres are a little resistant to, but I do think it will come.
[23:41] Phil: Is that use of technology something you've started doing or are looking at?
[23:46] Ricky: It's something we're building into our development processes as we move the business forward. Because of its size there are a lot of moving cogs in that, but we're also very much at the leading edge of those changes when they come, in terms of our ability to roll them out in the business.
[24:04] Phil: And is technology something you're actually doing? There are lots of different parts to technology. There's the front of house, being able to order things, but there are lots of technological changes happening back of house as well. I know a number of restaurants have moved to having screens rather than tickets. Is that something you do or are looking at?
[24:24] Ricky: We have some sites with KMS, kitchen management systems, and those are in some of the sites. We tend to use a lot of technology from a software point of view: really strong systems on stock control, menu development, and ordering – we have EDI ordering. But also when it comes to equipment, we use a lot of very standardised equipment, so we order the same oven, the same fryer, to make it easier for people to talk about. With that equipment, we're always looking for things that can help us be more efficient and cook quicker. With ovens, for instance, we make sure we have energy optimisation systems that allow us to manage the way the equipment is turned on, so that we don't waste power.
[25:07] Phil: Right. Because over 80 sites, that adds up to huge amounts of money. I guess other than heating for the garden centre, the kitchen is actually the most energy-intensive part of the business, is it?
[25:24] Ricky: In a big food operation it's probably more than the heating of the garden centre. And chefs hate being cold – they like to turn up in the morning and turn the oven on at eight o'clock whether they need it or not. So it's about working with people to educate them, but also putting systems in place to almost make it hard for them to do that, because it's a cost that needs to be managed.
[25:52] Phil: Right. So I'm asking everybody I'm talking to while I'm here at Glee this question: what's one thing you think the garden sector could learn from outside of the industry? Something you've seen outside the industry that we could actually learn from and do.
[26:09] Ricky: I'm going to sound a little controversial. I think there are things they should learn not to do, especially within hospitality. I think garden centre restaurants are fantastic. I think they give people an amazing experience, whether in an independent or a really large business like ourselves. And in hospitality in the wider market there's been such a drive to reduce cost that it's actually been quite detrimental. I think the biggest lesson for garden centres is to be really true to yourself and not let that drive to rinse every single penny out of it damage your business, because guests come to restaurants to eat food, and they want great food in a great environment with great service. If we take that cost out of it too much, we'll kill it.
[26:55] Phil: It's all about the experience.
[27:00] Ricky: Yeah, absolutely.
[27:02] Phil: All right, well, I'd just like to say thanks so much, Ricky, for joining us today. It's been really fascinating finding out a little more about how you go about feeding so many people. You say over a million meals?
[27:08] Ricky: Yes, over a million a year.
[27:10] Phil: A year – that's amazing. Thanks very much, Ricky.
[27:13] Ricky: Thank you.