Lakeside North Harbour has selected Elior UK to operate its enhanced onsite café facilities as part of a five-year contract. Elior will enhance and manage the existing Atrium Café and open a newly designed café in Lakeside North Harbour’s Winter Garden. The improved cafés will provide occupiers and their staff and visitors with an exciting range of food and drinks including an artisan coffee brand and street food style options which reflect contemporary demands, including the trend for healthy, seasonal and nutritious meals and snacks.
Elior UK won the contract following a thorough process run by facilities management consultancy Neller Davies in which six organisations were invited to tender. The tender process included mystery shopping, market research, a Hospitality Focus group and an occupier feedback survey. Lakeside North Harbour was keen to ensure that its onsite cafes could meet the needs of its occupiers, including visitors and staff, with a particular focus on products which are considered healthy and nutritious, and ethically traded from sustainable sources. The importance of providing organic, seasonal, locally produced food options which reflect the diversity of the customer base was also taken into account as part of the decision making process.
As part of the contract, Elior UK has invested in new kitchen equipment to enable it to provide full hot meals and increase the speed of service to café customers. The relaunch also includes a refurbishment of the Atrium Café facilities to offer three new food concepts – Pizza Foundry, Heavenly Burger and Chu Global Flavours.
Karen Tyrrell, Client & Communications Manager at Lakeside North Harbour, comments: “It is important that our cafes offer a delicious and varied choice of high quality food and the breadth of Elior’s ranges was extremely impressive. We also loved the team’s creative fresh new look for our existing café and exciting design plans for the new Winter Garden café. A number of our occupiers also need an efficient and professional food ordering service for in-house meetings and corporate entertainment, and Elior’s online hospitality food ordering service, Spoonfed, meant we could meet this requirement too.”
Angela Wyer, Contract Director of Elior UK adds: “We were delighted to have been selected by such a first class business environment, which focuses hard on creating a solid sense of wellbeing for everyone who comes to the campus. As part of our plans we will be investing in the existing Atrium Café to introduce our artisan Barista & Baker concept, as well as establishing a new café in the Winter Garden area. We are looking forward to providing a whole raft of on-trend food concepts for Lakeside North Harbour, including our new healthy ‘grab and go’ range of freshly prepared sandwiches and wraps.”
Karen concludes: “We have been extremely pleased with the way in which Elior has quickly made improvements to our food offerings. Another important factor for us when selecting a new operator was the company’s commitment to its staff, through ongoing support and training and recognising excellence. With our previous café operating in-house we felt reassured that all staff could transfer easily and therefore continue to deliver their already exceptional standards of service to all occupiers as part of this exciting new development.”
Elior took over the contract at Lakeside North Harbour on 19th February 2018. The café opening hours are 0730 to 1600 Monday to Friday, with breakfast and lunch daily served and hospitality services also available for onsite occupiers.
Photo Caption – David Morant, Atrium Café Manager, Angela Wyer, Contract Director at Elior & Karen Tyrrell, Client & Communications Manager at Lakeside North Harbour in the newly refurbished Atrium Café