Alex Markham’s sndwch

Supplier and operator

The man who has been supplying artisan sandwiches to some of the North West’s best known venues and eateries, Alex Markham (main picture), has opened his own standalone site in Salford’s MediaCity, under his fast-growing lockdown start-up brand, ‘sndwch’. Sandwich & Food to Go found out more…

NEW OPPORTUNITY

Working behind the scenes making over 30,000 sandwiches each month, sndwch founder, Alex Markham, has become a supplier to premium coffee shops including 92 Degrees Coffee with its 11 branches and Manchester’s ManCoCo.

His client list continues with General Store group, Victoria Warehouse, Plentiful Wholefoods (Ramsbottom) and Village Greens (Prestwich), to name but a few. His wholesale operation runs out of his kitchen in Ancoats (Ancoats Food Factory) and also supplies food to go products to private hospitals, higher education and catering businesses.

Since its launch in September 2020, sndwch has grown phenomenally, turning over £125,000 in its first year, £500,000 in its second, and is now on track to reach £1million turnover this financial year, Alex Markham reports.

Now, branching out on his own for the first time, he has opened a sandwich and coffee shop on the ground floor of Arrive’s Tomorrow building in MediaCity, marking a £20,000 investment and joining his existing concession within MediaCity, General Store. Plush seating and Alex’s chilled electronica soundtrack help to create a relaxing place to eat, work and meet, or grab and go.

FRESH AND LOCAL

Alex’s dedication to fresh local produce, delivered to the customer at affordable prices, is what sets sndwch apart. “We hand-make all our sandwiches freshly each day. I tell my team, ‘make the sandwich you would want to eat’. It’s labour intensive, but you can certainly taste the difference,” he explains.

“We source all our produce from local suppliers we love. People respond really well to that and there’s a great sense of collaboration in northern businesses coming together to support each other.”

The new site also offers a good selection of vegan options, and will serve sndwch’s bestselling ‘NOT a Chicken Tikka & Onion Bhaji sndwch’. Their impressive hot drinks menu features blends from 92 Degrees Coffee.

FILM TO FOOD

Alex Markham reflects that he was supposed to go into broadcast engineering… Indeed, he went to London, did a degree in physics, then decided to travel for a bit before going into full time work. “I joined British Airways as cabin crew and flew all round the Middle East and was a boy from Burnley getting exposed to all the different senses and tastes, and the different ways of cooking foods. This really opened my eyes in terms of my palate and my experience of food,” he says.

“I’m a great believer that when the universe gives you little ‘threads’, to pull at them and find out where they go. My landlord at the time, also working for BA, had the chance to start importing rubber flooring from Serbia – which is a conversation you never expect to have! – so we brought over a few pallets, and that company grew from there for about nine years, taking me in a direction I really didn’t expect to go in.

“We grew that to a national brand, the Rubber Flooring Company. I was just 25 when I started that, we had 650 accounts across the country, and it gave me a real taste for running my own business. Then, unfortunately, the financial crisis of 2008/9 affected us, with a customer left owing us a substantial amount of money and making our business unsustainable after that, so closing it. But I decided then I could go back into what I was originally going to do, the TV work, so I set up Digital Stage doing live event production, lighting and sound. That was great, and I made some good contacts, but the jobs were few and far between and I found myself taking on jobs just to pay the bills etc and I wasn’t enjoying it. And I was on holiday in Portugal for my fortieth and I was going to do and edit a film for a conference on software, and I decided I just didn’t want to be doing that anymore, it wasn’t fun. Because I’m a real believer in making sure you enjoy what you’re doing…

“Not everyone’s lucky enough to have their own company, and do something that they love doing, so I asked myself what can I do? And I came across a video on facebook where somebody was making soup from leftovers, and I thought that’s a really good idea, so I developed that, did all the branding for it, selling it online to offices in Manchester city centre, making it at home in the kitchen, getting up at two in the morning to get all the fresh ingredients.”

In fact, Alex started making soup from the kitchen table of his Manchester flat, taking online orders and delivering it around the city on his bike. This grew into his brand SOOP, which was later stocked in Selfridges and won several Great Taste awards from the Guild of Fine Food. However, when the pandemic hit and the nation went into lockdown, this part of Alex’s story ground to a halt. As chance would have it, General Store group, one of Alex’s soup stockists, lost its sandwich supplier, and owner Mital Morar asked Alex to step in and start supplying the sandwiches - and so, sndwch was born.

“It’s a good example of just saying yes and figuring it out later!” says Alex. “I always return to a quote attributed to Winston Churchill - ‘success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm’. You have to be resilient and follow the opportunities that come your way.”

GOOD MENTORS

“I was also lucky enough to have a really good EHO (environmental health officer) at Manchester City Council who guided me through everything and were fundamental in helping me make sure everything produced was safe, and with my science background, that’s actually one area of the company I really enjoy! The regulations and paperwork, and making sure everything’s safe and correct,” Alex reveals.

“Then Mital Morar, who owns Ancoats’ General Store Group saw it, on social media, got in touch wanting to stock it, and that’s when it started to take off, when people saw it in the store. He also introduced me to the Business Growth Hub in Manchester, and again things started taking off because I got a mentor, was introduced to the Great Taste Awards, winning six gold stars across the range, including three gold stars for one of the products.

“As a result of that, Harrods, Selfridges and Fortnum and Mason got in touch, and they all wanted exclusivity… We moved into a commercial premises in Ancoats. Then, when the pandemic hit, that decimated sales, as our main customers were motorways service stations and garden centres through Cotswold Fayre, so we moved into sandwiches in March 2020. As ‘luck’ would have it, Mital at the Store Group lost his sandwich supplier – Adelie Fine Foods, Urban Eat sandwiches, who went bust at the beginning of the recession – so Mital came to me and asked if I could change my operation to making sandwiches. So feeling the ‘thread-puller’, I said yes, absolutely, so we started doing that and it’s just taken off again from there…

“Our first order was 450 sandwiches, and I was like ‘oh my goodness…’, so we started early that day and just got things done, but I’ve always said right from the beginning, make the sandwiches you’d want to eat yourself. You don’t always make much margin on them, but people keep buying them. The sandwiches are our main bread and butter at the moment, but we do have plans to resurrect the soup because it was a really nice product.”

KEEPING IT LOCAL

“One thing I’m really keen on is using local suppliers wherever we can, and we are so lucky in Manchester that there are so many great, local producers, and everyone’s collaborative; we have daily conversations about how we can create new products. We use local suppliers for the bread and meats, and there are so many great producers here that it seems silly not to use them. Can’t source everything this way, but we try,” Alex explains.

“Prices are going up, even when locally sourced - I’m getting emails from suppliers every day accordingly – because bakers, for example, might be using flour that’s not necessarily local. We’ve managed to absorb some of that. Conversely, some things have actually gone down in price, so we try and pass that on when possible.

“We are also trying to keep a full menu right now, there’s nothing we can’t get hold of at the minute, it’s just the prices, although eggs did seem to sort of ‘disappear’ at one point! This was due to cost of feed, the prices that supermarkets were paying, Avian flu etc., so a ‘perfect storm’.

“Yes, you’ve got to look at spreadsheets and be involved in the financials but you need to be involved, day to day, in your company. We’re only a small team, there’s only 14 of us, and I’m in the kitchen every day, and I’m there every day at our small concession over at Media City too, just talking to the staff, finding out the issues and trying to resolve them.”

TRENDS?

“Plant-based and veganism is growing, almost month on month. Of our top ten best-selling sandwiches, three of those are plant-based. Our second best-selling sandwich is plant-based. We only supply to about twenty different wholesale customers, but it seems that every month, a new plant-based sandwich appears in our top ten,” Alex reports.

“I’ve always wanted to make plant-based sandwiches that people want to eat… And we call them plant-based, rather than vegan. So it’s a plant-based chicken and stuffing, a plant-based BLT and so on. We don’t try and ‘fancy them up’ too much. Our most popular one right now is our plantbased Not a Chicken Tikka and Onion Bhaji on white bread, and it absolutely flies, and we use the chicken from This Isn’t Chicken.

“We do ‘requests’ as well. Loaf in Manchester, who only have two shops, came to us to do a bespoke menu which we did for them, and because we’re such a small company we’ve got that flexibility to do that. Everything is made by hand, not one machine in the production process, apart from the bag sealer.

“We feel that we are doing all right as we are, in Manchester, although it’s tempting to expand and roll out further, but because we are predominantly a wholesale manufacturer with our existing customers, there’s a nice circularity there in which we also use each other’s products, for example (we supply 92 Degrees and use their coffee in our outlet).

“There are definitely two strands to the company. The retail side that we were given the opportunity for through Store Group and the Media City concession, and Mital has been fantastic all the way, asking us if we’d be interested in a butty shop there where sandwiches are prepared in front of the customer, which we were, and it’s doing really well. Then we opened the coffee shop there as well… And there is potential for us to open up other retail shops on the high street. I don’t have experience in that; that’s something I’m probably going to have get someone in who does. The wholesale side of things is - I don’t want to say easier – because it’s not! It’s just a much more straightforward timeline of production, sale and delivery.”

A SANDWICH DELIVERY SERVICE?

“Obviously, we have a delivery driver for our wholesale customers, but a driver who delivers our sandwiches direct to customers/consumers is not something I’d considered, as I do think people are gradually getting back into the offices,” says Alex.

“In fact, we have noticed that a lot. Things are starting to really pick up at Media City, for example. I don’t think we’ll ever be back to how it was, many companies having worked out that working from home can save them money... But we have been lucky with our set of circumstances and business support along the way, and our branding – we have a good graphic designer on board.”

WHAT’S NEXT?

“We have ambitious plans for growth and some new collaborations to reveal soon. Something big is coming next year to further stamp our arrival in Manchester - watch this space!” concludes Alex Markham. “But In summary, I would say that when an opportunity presents itself, don’t ignore it!

Find out more at www.sndwch.co.uk