V for variety
After the success of the Charlton House open day, managing director Robyn Jones has decided to repeat the event as a half-day seminar. The company has been approached to carry out further consultancy work. The packed lunch project in the two St Benedicts schools in west London is off to a good start with staff at Charlton House meeting some of the teachers and parents.
There's a buzz of excitement at Charlton House with the prospect of a new contract on the horizon. Because of the competitive nature of the business, managing director Robyn Jones is not giving much away, except to confirm that the company has just been awarded a "substantial contract". Added to this, there are five other potential projects in the pipeline, either awaiting decision or in the process of being tendered for.
While waiting for the outcome of these developments, Charlton House has been busy with VE day themed parties. The Guide Dogs for the Blind contract in Reading staged an event where a week's rations were laid out on view along with samples of wartime cooking such as beetroot casserole and carrot curry.
Brooklands' annual summer party, to be held in June for friends and associates of the museum, will also centre on the VE Day theme. It is expected that 350 people will attend the event in Weybridge, Surrey, and Charlton House is going to reuse the menu offered by London's Savoy Hotel on VE Day. The original menu is written in French and consists of wartime luxuries such as vol-au-vents and chicken.
Staff will dress up in wartime clothing and the whole site will be themed with blacked out windows, sandbags and old forces buses to transport people around.
Also using themes to advantage is manufacturer James Walker, the Woking client which held a Mutiny on the Bounty theme day at the end of April. Sales increased by a healthy 30% on the day.
This month, Robyn has also been approached to act as a consultant. The couple from Ireland who have their own contract catering business and couldn't make the open day (Caterer, 27 April) have confirmed a date in early June to see Robyn. She plans to take them through the whole organisation behind Charlton House, from sales and marketing to finance and information technology and general operations and training.
Evenings have been busy, with Robyn introducing the benefits of packed lunches at parents' evenings at the two St Benedict's schools in west London. When she presented them with a week's sample menu, feedback was positive. Parents thought that the balance was good and saw how pre-prepared lunches could offer them a valuable time-saving alternative.
Robyn also tackled the problem of only providing one variety of sandwich a day. She decided that lunches would be made up with sandwiches left in a chilled unit for children to choose what they wanted.
So far, it is difficult to gauge the results as further leaflets are to go out and prices are being set in line with what the school charges for hot meals. The project is to be launched next month.
On the staff front, Charlton House is advertising and interviewing for an accounting assistant. Tim Jones wants to get out to meet clients more often, so an assistant based at Bix Manor for a couple of days would really help him out.
Outside work, at the end of last month Robyn went with operations manager Caroline Fry to London's Dorchester Hotel. Fry was collecting her Acorn Award, an industry accolade sponsored by CPC Caterplan, honouring 30 young people under 30. Robyn is also one of the judges for the Caterer & Hotelkeeper Awards' Manager of the Year Award winner, to be announced on July 4.
Furthermore, she has been asked to speak at a one-day seminar for the Local Authority Caterers Association, London and South-east region. She will not only talk about Charlton House but also the broader subject of contract catering.
On a lighter note, one of Charlton House's relief chefs found himself in a slippery situation this month when he had to cover for a week at the Duracel contract in Crawley. He found he could not get to work, however, because a petrol tanker had jack-knifed half a mile away from the company.
The police barriers were finally taken down at 12.15pm, and the relief chef got lunch prepared in three-quarters of-an-hour, managing to stick to the set menu except for the pudding.
But his efforts nearly ended in vain when one of the company directors told everyone, except him, that lunch would be free to compensate for the incident. The resulting stampede meant that the chef had to prepare extra food as people queued up afraid it would run out.
