Education: Quarterly Business Review
Matthew Brown Managing Director, Education.
An introduction from Welcome to our first 2024 quarterly business review. “ ”
I am delighted to be able to share a comprehensive review of all the goingson within our sector, what we have been working on since Christmas, and what we have in store over the coming months. As well as providing you with an insight, we hope it may raise awareness of activities we have that could benefit your school. As ever, if there are things that you would like us to look at in the future, or provide an update on, please do let us know.
It’s been a busy and fruitful start to 2024 in the Education space. From the launching of our brand-new coffee brandHOUSE, to welcoming two new central team members, our new nutritionist Annabel Kibble and in-house events specialist, Lizzi Wood.
You will all be aware of our big news story, that sees us joining forces with Compass group. This promises to bring significant benefits to all our colleagues, clients and customers, and we look forward to providing future communications on how
that will develop. Needless to say, we are all very excited about what is to come, and we can be sure that colleagues, clients and customers will continue to be our primary focus.
We’ve covered all the main bases in this review, from people and procurement activity to operational updates, which we hope you find informative.
I want to thank you for taking the time to review this, as a valued client it is as important to us that you feel supported and informed about our activities, so that, as a collaborative partner, we can best support you in delivering in line with your objectives.
Finally, I’m aware that budgets are being prepared and that perhaps now more than ever, landing on the right numbers and delivering to them is crucial. The central team are always available to support as required, so please let us know if we can help in any way.
HSE update from Jenny Todd
In January we launched our Safety Culture Survey, results are in and more than 75% were positive responses, areas to improve were initially identified as being communication and ease of reporting. We are working on solutions to raise awareness and make it easier to report and health and safety concerns.
This year we have also launched some new / improved processes:
Corrective action status flagging automatic notifications to remind sites to complete outstanding audit actions.
Ops Manager audits
reduced content audit focussing on food, health, and safety, migrated to our Maia auditing platform for ease of use. Each site will receive an audit from their ops team twice per year.
Audit failure escalation provides a framework of actions, responsibilities, and timelines in the event of an audit failure to rapidly rectify issues.
Coming Soon Accident Prevention Week
On the 15th of April we launched a week-long campaign around accident prevention which includes an all teams kick off session followed by a week of activities for site managers to share with their team and the launch of some new processes.
We are delighted to welcome our THREE newest central team members, Annabel Kibble, Lizi Wood & Hannah Lewis
AnnabelWelcomeKibble
Annabel Kibble –Nutritionist update and introduction
to “ ”
I recently joined CH&CO Education and Healthcare as Senior Nutritionist. I am a Registered Nutritionist with the Association for Nutrition and have a degree in Nutrition from the University of Surrey. I have over 8 years food industry and contract catering experience, with previous roles including Nutritionist for Sky for over 6 years and Junior Nutritionist for the fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) company General Mills.
I am also a mum to two little foodies, Iona and Daphne and love sharing my joy of good food with them daily.
So far, I have been busy getting a grasp of the diversity of the sector, meeting the teams, and visiting sites.
I will be working with the food team to develop their knowledge of nutrition, work with each head chef on their menu development, support marketing with nutritional communications as well as deliver on site educational assemblies and pop ups to pupils.
I am also involved in a project to create nutritional guidance and principles in relation to retail lines and snack ranges.
Whilst Lizi is on maternity leave, we are delighted to welcome Hannah Lewis, who will be picking up events work in Lizi’s absence.
Lizi Wood & Hannah Lewis Welcome to “
Lizi Wood –Events update and introduction.
Joining the team in January from our Company of Cooks team, I have been tasked with supporting our Education clients with Enterprise opportunities spanning from venue hire and events. With over 15 years’ experience in a range of venues, going forward, my plan is to lead, coach, develop onsite team activity and help to drive the best possible results for event sales, assisting with profitability from the commercial section within each school.
This includes general marketing, social media, target audiences to draw the audiences.
If there is any additional support you feel your teams need or would like to introduce commercial revenue to your venue, please do get in touch.
Hannah Lewis –Events update and introduction.
Hannah has studied Creative Events Management at University and started her career at OXO2 as a Sales & Events Assistant and continued with CH&CO working within the teams at Dartmouth House, Chiswick House & Gardens, Abbey Road Studios and Eve (central sales). She loves working with clients to see their dream events come to life from initial ideas to delivery.
A key focus for Hannah will be bringing new event and filming revenue streams to our sites. Not only will Hannah use her connections within CH&CO and external event & filming agencies but grow this database to national scale to bring opportunities to each and every site.
We warmly welcome Hannah to the team.
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HR update from Karl O’Brien
From a people perspective, we’ve been busy. We’ve undertaken new initiatives which have proved successful (and entertaining, I’m sure!) including launching our ‘In Conversations’, ‘Cooking with Karl’, and Education team surveys.
Since the new year we have been working to complete performance reviews and update probation periods. In addition, we have a number of exciting new recognition and benefits coming soon including recognition cards and long service awards.
I look forward to overseeing these new developments as we head into the next term.
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Recognising our people
We’ve been working on ways to recognise and celebrate our on-site team members and colleagues who make our business thrive every day.
We will be backdating and dispatching long service awards for commitment to our business. We will further be sending birthday cards to help each and every team member feel special and valued, and recognition cards for outstanding work or service to help increase productivity, foster a sense of inclusion, and continue to drive results for each and every one of our sites.
Reductions Absence
We have actively been tracking staff sickness and absence days across all of sites.
Since March 2023 I’m pleased to announce that we have reduced monthly absences from 736 days in April 2023 to 478 in March 2024.
This is a 35% reduction in absence days and a 17% reduction in head count.
This has been done by elevating our culture at site, increasing the knowledge of our operators though coaching and training allowing our teams to manage these absences more effectively.
In addition, long term sicknesses days have reduced from 34 in April 2023 to just 6 in March 2024, with only 3 over a year long.
Food update from Nikki Low
As usual, I’ve been living and breathing all things food!
I’m excited to share several new developments since the new year including:
A centralised menu
Marketing theme days, menu development and recipe support
Food pop-ups including street food kitchen takeover pop-ups and Hide & Seek (hidden vegetable pop ups)
Butchery day/chef training Workshops
Photoshoot support for counters and fine dining hospitality brochure
‘Brain food bakery’
I wanted to congratulate Sasho for representing Education at the chef of the year final. A massive well done and more great examples of the excellence we strive for on the Education team.
What’s coming next?
We are working on an exciting afternoon tea spec where we can support schools which offer afternoon tea by preparing exquisite cakes, scones, and macarons, freeing up precious time to help sites focus on prepping fresh sandwiches.
We hope and intend this to be a success through furthering our afternoon tea offer and streamlining the process so our chef teams on site and our clients get the most efficient customer offer and service for afternoon tea.
Inspirations Food
We’ve created a series of recipes to get our site teams inspired for upcoming foodie days in the calendar.
We have informed all chefs of the long-awaited introduction of ‘The Kitchen’ on our CH&CO intranet.
This will act as a central repository for recipe inspiration and knowledge sharing across our Education culinary team.
We will be updating these recipes periodically!
Marketing update from Jack Goodwin
I’ve been working to support sites and develop a range of promotional initiatives that will help us deliver smiles to our customers.
I’ve been proud to work with Nikki to develop a series of spring term and summer term theme days, centred around ‘Flavours of the World’ –a series of 5 distinct national and regional dishes from around the world which last a full term including ‘Rock’n Moroccan’ and ‘Greek Goodness’.
We undertook a series of webinars at the start of the summer term to walk through optimal execution of these marketing theme days to ensure we get the most out of them at site.
In addition to theme day and menu promotions
I am very proud and pleased to announce the launch of ‘HOUSE Coffee’ which was successfully launched at DLD College in March. This new brand was designed to match high street
competition whilst providing tray bakes and snack options which contain a fraction of the sugar, or highly processed ingredients found on the high street. Through the rebrand of the coffee offer, and strategic product offer and great customer service, sales have gone up considerably at DLD College.
We have created a HOUSE Coffee brochure which outlines the purpose and on the ground feel of the brand here:
Click me to read about HOUSE
My focus now is to rebrand our allergen posters, deliver the summer term promotional posters and menus to site and support Karl on designing the recognition cards and long service award certificates.
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Sustainability update from Clare Clark
I’m pleased to announce that The Science Based Targets initiative has verified CH&CO’s net-zero science-based target by 2040.
The Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) is a collaboration between CDP, the United Nations Global Compact, World Resources Institute (WRI) and the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF). The SBTi defines and promotes best practice in science-based target setting and independently assesses companies’ targets.
In January to support our net zero target and animal welfare standards, our focus was on serving less but better meat to tie in with Veganuary.
In February, we celebrated all that is seasonal and local highlighting to our teams why supporting local businesses is important and how seasonal menus can help support our sustainability targets.
In March, our focus was to progress to our target to slash food waste by 50% by 2030. We have challenged our teams to cut waste and are incentivising our sites to deliver creative solutions around waste with their team. Our winning team will be chosen by world renowned chef Douglas McMaster, owner of the worlds first zero waste restaurant.
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Procurement update from Phillipa Raven
It’s fair to say that the volatility and unpredictability we’ve seen for some time continues in many categories, as well as availability challenges where demand has outstripped supply, or where extreme weather patterns have impacted crops, and we still cannot underestimate
the ongoing effect of the situation in the Red Sea which will see delays and more recently the
Border checks on dairy, produce and fresh flowers from the EU will all have an impact on pricing.
The outlook for kitchen-door food prices is becoming more positive as inflation will continue to ease, albeit slowly. However, a fall in prices (deflation) on the full basket of food and drink is unlikely until at least early 2025. Producers are still grappling with the after-effects of war, adverse weather, high farm input inflation and weak
consumer demand, but eying 2024 as the return to a semblance of normality. The outlook remains uncertain for some commodities such as wheat. As well as weather threats, the grain may face potential restrictions on Russian exports, according to Rabobank. And while Ukraine will continue to ship supplies it will have a smaller exportable surplus in the next few years.
Although there clearly are some challenges, we are striving to overcome these and ensure that quality and consistency are at the heart of what we do and continue to provide a fantastic service for our clients and customers. We expect that the outlook will improve as we head further into 2024 and look forward to updating you for our next business review. Thanks for reading!
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An update from your operations manager Louisa Vicaria
My sites had a great term last week. We hosted a number of Hide and Seek food pop ups, one was at High March School, where we also delivered a foodie assembly. These was extremely well received by the girls, who thoroughly enjoyed it!
We held a French theme day at Elmhurst school, with a café and croissant breakfast, followed by a bistro-style lunch. This helped embed academic learning and understanding with food, which was a huge success.
There are some exciting redesign projects across several of my sites, which we hope will result in a heightened look and feel for
staff and students, and we aim to have these completed by the end of summer.
Beyond these initiatives, I have been busy with health and safety audits, completing training and performance appraisals. The results were overwhelmingly positive and stand us in good stead to head into the summer term.
Finally, the entrepreneurial scheme that Lizi and Hannah are working with us on, is a huge part of the added value that we can offer to clients.
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Share Client
At CH&CO Independent, we appreciate how important it is to establish a way in which we can regularly check in with our clients to understand in a structured way how they are feeling about the service and support we provide, what we are doing well and where we need to improve.
To provide each of our valued clients with the opportunity to feed back we have invested in a new technology platform which currently has only been launched for CH&CO Education. We have worked hard to ensure that this is quick and easy to use, whilst at the same time providing a clear picture of the important themes.
Please do take a couple of minutes to provide your honest feedback and for our part we promise to follow up on any actions that come out of that. We will seek feedback quarterly so that we can monitor progress. You will have the opportunity to make any relevant comments should you wish to do so, and there is an option to request a visit from a member of our Exec team.
We fully appreciate that some of our clients may not wish to complete Clientshare. For those who want to raise feedback through their operations manager, we also encourage you to do so.
