The casual seafood brand, which opened its first restaurant in Leicester in March this year, already operates three locations, with a further two having opened in Birmingham, on Broad Street and in Star City in the following two months.
It says it has plans to open at least another three sites before the end of the year, with Liverpool, Brixton, Milton Keynes and Glasgow its choice of locations. Further restaurants in Leeds, Nottingham, and Manchester are also on the cards.
Shrimp & Co’s first three sites are company owned but co-founder Imran Makda says that future expansion will be built on a franchise model, which he hopes will see the business expand across the country and beyond.
In the short term, the company wants to add a further 12 restaurants to its estate in the next year, and that by the third year it intends to reach 50 stores in the UK.
“Once we get to that number, we will start looking at sites abroad, in Europe and also maybe the UAE,” says Makda. “We want to build a very strong presence in the UK first before expanding further.”
The Nando’s of seafood
Shrimp & Co’s menu features a wide range of dishes that includes bites such as queen shrimp, butter bay mussels, bisque soup, and cod sticks. Its main offer centres on a range of sharing seafood platters as well as its signature shrimps, fish fillets and shrimp boils. Dishes range in heat from the mildest ‘smooth sailing’, to ’inferno’.
The company’s mission statement is to make ‘seafood fun, social, and accessible in the UK’ and to create a brand with the same cultural pull as Nando’s, but in the seafood space.
“We are trying to become the Nando’s of seafood,” says Makda. “The idea came from the fact that there isn’t anything like that out there at the moment. You go into a Nando’s and there’s every single different type of person there that enjoys it, and that’s essentially the vision for us.
“Traditionally, when you think about seafood you think it’s expensive and very easy to get wrong. The spin we want to put on it is to make it fun, make it vibrant and make it affordable to the masses,” Makda continues, adding that the average spend per couple is around £55.
Shrimp & Co’s sites are typically between 80 and 120 seats, although it says its Star City site is the largest seafood restaurant in the UK with 250 covers. The company is also exploring the idea of opening smaller, express locations of around 900 to 1,200sq ft to tap into the grab and go market.
“We will look at potentially opening places for lunch deals where people want to have good quality food but grab and go. We will start off in London fairly soon and see how it goes.”