Catering firm Bennett Hay has carved a niche for itself by getting into office projects at the design stage and providing food and beverages on all floors from its basement kitchens. Michelle Perry gets a taste for this type of catering service
Bennett Hay has been quietly busy. Intent on remodelling the traditional role of the in-house caterer in tenanted buildings, it has created a bespoke service more akin to that of a boutique hotel.
Contract caterers are typically appointed by individual occupiers within buildings, but BH is shaking things up by working closely with property developers from the design stage to win contracts for the whole building.
This strategy is not just benefiting Bennett Hay but occupiers and developers too. It enables the caterer to offer a seamless and broad service, while saving occupiers the significant time and money involved in tendering contracts for their individual pieces of catering business and boosting retention rates for landlords.
In 2011 BH took over a café in Cardinal Place, 80 Victoria Street, SW1, a retail and office development owned by Land Securities. It was relatively unchartered waters for Land Securities, which at the time did not have many cafés in its reception areas.
But within a few years BH increased revenues in the café by 40%, illustrating the clear commercial benefit of using reception spaces in this way.
“What we did at the time was build the revenue and the café with a fresher offer. Then we started to expand other services for tenants in the building,” says Anthony Bennett, BH’s owner/director.
Over the past five years the company has added ad hoc hospitality and events services to its offer, including business lunches and evening events, as well as office services.
For tenants, the advantage of this kind of service is that it can be bought on a pay-as-you-go basis, eliminating the additional costs associated with in-house chefs and corporate kitchens.
Winning formula
Its success at Cardinal Place has led BH to open a new operation in Thomas More Square, E1, near Tower Hill (LandSec sold the estate to Resolution Property for around £300m in March) while another is due to open at 20 Eastbourne Terrace, W2, (another LandSec building) next year.
Working closely with property developers from the outset is crucial to ensuring the benefits radiate to all parties. Often the basements of buildings cannot be let out to tenants and are typically used as storage space. But with this catering model, property developers can design and build bespoke kitchens in the basements of their buildings, making revenue-generating space that serves the entire building and its occupants.
At the same time, valuable office space need not be given over to kitchens for the caterers of individual tenants. And BH can grow through economies of scale.
“The key to this type of contract is in the developer understanding the value of having an operation in the building for tenants,” Bennett says.
Landlords take a cut of BH’s revenues, so there is no extra cost to occupiers. In the context of the developer’s main business it is small change, but if it means retention rates remain high and occupiers are happy, that in itself makes the partnership worthwhile.
“One of the things we noticed as a developer looking at our tenants and their needs was the importance of the ground floor as a ‘third space’. We saw Bennett Hay’s service as complementary to how our tenants want to use the office building with no extra cost to them,” says Oliver Knight, leasing and sales director at Land Securities.
To make it even easier for tenants to purchase BH’s services, the company is looking into its use of technology. Later this year the caterer plans to introduce mobile payments for its services.
“It is about getting to know the different companies in the buildings and what their needs are,” Bennett says. “It is about building trust with them.”
Chapter Spitalfields
Student accommodation has come a long way in the past few decades. Towering above Liverpool Street Station, EC2, is one of the latest breed of student halls, housing international university students hailing from 106 different countries. But this tower block is more like an upmarket five-star hotel than student digs.
Chapter Spitalfields, bought by US property company Greystar in 2015, is a 33-storey tower housing around 1,200 students where the cheapest rooms cost on average £1,250 a month.
For that price undergraduates at Chapter, which opened in 2010, can access various facilities – from karaoke rooms, cinema, gym and a 24/7 onsite team, to a coffee shop, study spaces, auditorium and courtyard.
Given the stiff competition from the high street at Chapter, Bennett Hay must work hard to win and retain the residents’ business.
Active internal marketing is used for its publicly accessible artisan café on the ground level, food and drink delivery service to the karaoke and screening rooms, and the cocktail bar on the 32nd floor.
