When my colleague Millie (Manzur) and I were first introduced to the concept of Entegra, it’s safe to say we had no idea what it was or that this type of business even existed. I had spent the last 15 years running restaurants in London and the Middle East as well as working as an F&B director for global hotel brands. Millie, meanwhile, had been running London restaurants.
The idea of outsourcing PR to an experienced, qualified and well-connected PR agency to save on the payroll expense of hiring your whole in-house team was entirely normal. Yet the idea that you could outsource food and beverage purchasing, sourcing and negotiation to a global, qualified and experienced team was completely new to us. On closer inspection, it made complete sense.
For hospitality teams, the concept of aces in places is ingrained in so much decision making, threaded through everything that happens. Is the chef skilled and creative? Are your leaders ambitious innovators? Are your GMs tenacious? Do your people have the ever-coveted hospitality gene?
However, when it comes to pricing, sourcing and negotiation it is very often the executive chef taking the lead. But that person’s skill set is most likely going to be highly creative and very demanding. Coupled with the added pressures of playing a leading role in managing a business, leading teams, menu development along with so much more – it’s a big ask for them to be on top of procurement too.
Of course, the financial director may also take a leading role, but in each scenario, not only are those people focused on running the business – they would be negotiating on their businesses managed spend and market insight alone.
We wouldn’t go it alone when looking to renew our own mortgage, we would get a broker to do it. So when it comes to sourcing and negotiation on food and beverage as well as non-food items, particularly in the current market, outsourcing some or all categories to Entegra is the smarter choice.
The concept works by pooling our total managed spend with all our clients to better negotiate. We may have a supplier relationship with a £20m annual spend through 800 UK clients. That gives us far greater leverage than an independent. We have a team of qualified category buyers, so one person would be totally dedicated to spending 50 hours of their week focused on meat and poultry buying, sourcing and negotiation on behalf of our clients, for example.
The rest of the team is made up of former chefs and hospitality operators on the ground, working directly with current clients on their own agendas and objectives. Millie and I focus on finding and developing solutions for new restaurant businesses, none of which are the same.
The business is not just about better pricing, it’s about the right solutions for the specific business. We have sourced indigenous ingredients, found solutions for sustainability goals, found the right provenance story needed for a concept or worked on a distribution model on behalf of our clients.
This doesn’t need to be on every food category, in some cases this work is done on select categories. There are many instances where there is a special relationship or provenance with a particular supplier which we would recommend to keep in place.
In this case we might look at the dry and frozen category for example. If we have a direct manufacturer deal or can source sugar, milk and mayonnaise on a better deal to protect your bottom line, it’s a great solution.
Market intelligence has also played a big role in insights we have delivered into clients. Knowing that there is an avian flu to alert our clients, an algae surge in Chile affecting global salmon supply or the effect of Russia‘s war against Ukraine has given our clients foresight on what to expect, guiding potential decisions on change. Our cost is paid for through our supply partners on our managed spend, so unlike the PR agency example, we are not a direct cost to our hospitality clients.
Finding solutions and pricing and the success of that has been reliant on receiving the correct data and forecasts as well as key objectives from businesses from the outset. Thereafter, we do the legwork to find and present the right solutions for the business on the categories they want to investigate, which they either agree with or tweak.
In this ever-changing climate, and with so many restaurants focused on the impact of increasing costs we can help bridge the gap. Contact us here for more information.