The Coffee House is on target to open its 25th store in the North of England by 2025
Independent speciality coffee house operator for the North of England, The Coffee House, is celebrating more than a decade of consistent growth as it opens its twelfth store in Bolton. Partnering with P2P (Procure-to-Pay) catering technology firm Zupa, the company has been using the Caternet platform to run its operations more efficiently and make more intelligent business decisions. The Coffee House now plans to roll out the Caternet platform across all of its stores to help power its ambitious growth strategy through automated procurement.
At start-up, The Coffee House, depended on accessible, consumer-based apps to communicate across its business. This approach quickly became unsustainable, and complex to manage with the scale and speed needed for product visibility and tracking between stores. The Coffee House has since built a strong partnership with Zupa, which has facilitated a transfer of vital skills and knowledge into its business, giving it a clear vision of what it needs to do and when, and more importantly, who needs to do it.
Chris Shelmerdine, director and co-founder of The Coffee House explained, “Centralising our back-end operations and having the future-proofed IT infrastructure to give us stock visibility and quick real-time dashboard insight into the financials and operations, means we can focus our attention on driving value and quality experiences for our customers. We’re thrilled to have partnered with Zupa and to be rolling out the system across all of our locations, the company has become an integral part of our growth journey.”
As The Coffee House prepares to roll out its new stores, with Caternet at the core of its operations, its understanding of what its business needs, also continues to evolve. Using technology that scales with it has been essential to its growth. The company now benefits from having complete control of its supply chain and spending, which has become imperative in the current climate.
Ollie Brand, CEO at Zupa said, “We thoroughly enjoy working with Chris and the team. It’s a mutually beneficial relationship where we look to deliver value as a trusted advisor, and we learn so much that we are able to feedback into our product vision. We’ve always been keen to let the technology speak for itself. This process has also helped The Coffee House to recognise its immediate needs, and our team have been able to apply the functionality of the platform to those specific requirements at that point in time, meaning the platform evolves with the business.”
Customer experience is core to The Coffee House, and it wants to ensure its teams are free to focus on building relationships with their customers. To support this focus, it has recently relocated all back-end operations to a 17,000 square foot facility, centralising its logistics, production unit, bakery and kitchen and is also about to launch a new roastery.
“We are so thankful to be in business and to be sharing our coffee shop experience within our local communities. We are taking nothing for granted and what drives us forward despite the challenging times the sector is facing, is the rich data we’re able to extract from the Caternet platform, which helps us make more intelligent business decisions. We’ve been working with the Zupa team to align the system more closely to our own business requirements too, and can see clearly how the functionality can help secure our future goals,” added Shelmerdine.