People First! Safety for our staff and customers will always be our priority.
By Austen Dack - Speaking to Rebecca Lord MD of Friars Pride
I
t has been a vastly different year to any other, what challenges have you faced and how have you overcome them? It has been the most challenging of my 15 years in post – Brexit (remember that) then Covid 19. As the pandemic started to escalate and Boris made his lockdown speech – many of the 200 people who worked for Friars Pride were very apprehensive about the situation. This was the same for the majority of our customers, who were concerned about keeping their staff safe and as a result closed their shops. Friars Pride was quickly left with little trade and a concerned workforce; and as a responsible family business I made the difficult decision to temporarily place the business on pause to protect our people and their families. We are a strong independent family company and we had some fantastic support from our suppliers and the government’s job retention scheme. Quickly, we had a small team of excellent people working and within a few days customers who had remained open or had re-opened again contacted us for goods. We quickly adapted our processes to adhere to the latest government guidelines and social distancing rules and opened a ‘Call and Collect’ service at each depot within days. This service became very popular and as more customers had the confidence to re-open safely we
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Chippy Chat & Fast Food Magazine • September 2020
gradually re-opened our delivery service with updated processes according to government guidelines within weeks. As more shops opened, we increased our delivery routes and service across all seven depots and consequently brought more of our staff back to work. Doing our best to look after our staff has given them more confidence to return to work and provide our dedicated customer service as much as possible with the Coronavirus still prevalent. We kept communicating with our customers and gave a forum for customers to share ideas on how to re-open using social media, e-mail campaigns, post and telesales. Thankfully, trading has almost reached similar levels to last year. Fish and chips is our livelihood – we put business on hold for health and life. We adapted our operation for safety reasons– putting people before profit. What is the mood of your key suppliers now? They have faced challenges but are thankful trade is coming back. There were some challenges in the supply chain during lockdown, however most of our suppliers have now increased capacity as sales have returned, and on a positive note some suppliers have increased production and investment on certain products due to the increased business from takeaways. Packaging is a great example of where
Chippy Chat & Fast Food Magazine • September 2020
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