JJ Foodservice is a family-owned independent company, established in 1988. Its 12 nationwide branches are staffed by nearly 1,000 employees and the group works with more than 400 active local and global suppliers to supply over 3,000 product lines.
The company takes 34,000 orders per week, while reaching 83,000 foodservice and home customers.
Kaan Hendekli, Chief Operating Officer at JJ Foodservice, tells Wholesale Manager how the group’s recently opened new depot at Wimbledon is performing and about JJ’s ambition to open three to four branches in London.
Where have you worked before and in what roles?
I finished university and I was working in marketing jobs, but then I decided to take a master’s degree, so I came to the UK. After finishing my master’s degree in marketing, I wanted to have a little bit of work experience. So I found a job in JJ Foodservice, back in 2010, in telesales. After a few months in telesales, I moved to procurement, the purchasing department. I stayed there for a while, and then moved to operations and later on became deputy branch manager of Enfield, then branch manager of Enfield. Then I became head of operations and finally, last year became chief operating officer.
What does your current role involve?
As COO, I oversee day to day operations and implement operational strategies to drive efficiency. But I think more than anything it is about fostering a culture of collaboration and working with people. Operation is the muscle of any business because we make things happen. I think more important than the operation is just to create a culture and I work very closely with our teams. We will try to identify the areas for improvement, and we implement changes because I believe without a change, if you just stand still, you’re going to fail. So, we try to improve whatever what we do, even if it works, we try to make it better. And ultimately, it helps the bottom line, the success of teams and operations, because operation is very big in JJ. In terms of numbers, we employ 850 people and about 650 of those are in operations. So it’s a really important team. And it’s really important how we operate in terms of efficiency. So I focus on that and on this culture of working collaboratively to create a sense of ownership of the company. We have for the first time introduced a profit share initiative. So, our employees get 5% of our profit of that year. Last year it was £1.3 million that we shared among our employees.
What are your goals for what you want to achieve in the role?
We have a very young and dynamic management team. The transition from the current leadership to the next generation comes with great opportunities for us because we can change the business culture and practices for the better. In terms of goals I want to achieve, I’m also very much focusing on sustainability, not only because it’s the right thing to do, but also it helps commercially. It helps the bottom line because if you’re a sustainable business, then you become sustainable in all aspects, not only environmentally sustainable but financially sustainable and from a people perspective. So I want to focus on all the three aspects of sustainability. We did the profit share last year in terms of people sustainability. For the environmental sustainability, we converted all 12 of our branches to solar power. We’re not using any gas in any of our warehouse machinery anymore, we converted everything to electric. I want to make JJ a great place to work, in all aspects.
How is JJ Foodservice currently performing as a business?
We have a very strong business in terms of bottom line and sales and growth. Year on year since I’ve been here, we have increased in every metric. This is a particularly tough market because of all the things that have happened: the war, the interest rates, the supply chain problems. So, the eating out market is struggling a bit. But we are responding in an aggressive way, because it’s a fight that we need to win. So, we are extending our product range. The goal is to increase it by 50% in the next one to two years. We are opening new branches; we are acquiring new businesses. We have acquired a foodservice business called Gatelands, which is performing in the Asian sector, predominantly serving Thai and Japanese restaurants.
In terms of business, we give a lot of importance to customer service and what we call promise to deliver. When we receive an order from customers, our promise to them is that we will deliver it as it’s ordered. Very importantly, we have more than 99% product availability.
We also target new markets as a response to the turbulence of the market. We have tried to open new areas and new branches, acquiring new businesses and trying to increase our market share in the areas where we were not very present. We are focusing on increasing our presence in markets such as care homes and garden centres.
You recently opened a new depot at Wimbledon. How is it performing so far?
It’s been five weeks since we started trading and it is going well. Like any other branch of ours, it is open seven days a week for collection. We also have a delivered service. Wimbledon is an area that we were previously only present in with food deliveries through our Sidcup branch. But now being there in Wimbledon, for collection for our customers, it proves to be a great choice that we made because it’s a very affluent area and we can offer our product range to the customers of Wimbledon and neighbouring areas like Kingston and Twickenham. We get a great response every week, we are increasing numbers of customers and sales. At the moment we have introductory offers which are getting a great response. So far, it is proving to be the right investment that we made.
Do you have any further extension plans?
Yes, we are on the lookout for new branches to open. We want to increase our presence in London. Our ambition is to open three to four branches in London, in the South and Northwest of the city. Although we deliver everywhere, we want to have a collection service for our customers because it offers a great value. Not only the price, but also convenience because we’re not a conventional cash & carry so it’s not like customers go in and shop around the aisles, we offer a different service.
You can place an order online, it’s sort of like Argos, we receive the order, we make the products ready, we load the vehicles and the products arrive in the selected time slot. So, there’s a lot of time saving for the customers. There are also many advantages on the delivery prices. So being present in certain areas is a collection hub, it’s very beneficial for both customers and us. That’s the goal.
We are at the moment building an extension to our main depot. It’s about 30,000 square feet and it will be about 5,000 pallet capacity. And it will serve as a hub depot. This is to distribute the stock to all our branches. This is related to our ambition of increasing our product range. Lastly, like with Gatelands Foodservice, we are on the lookout for acquiring companies and bringing their product range and knowledge of the market they serve to us. That’s another thing we are heavily focused on at the moment.
What benefits do you get from being part of Unitas?
From Unitas the benefits are on the emerging categories or developing categories like snacks or drinks. It helps us to identify new brands, new suppliers and then identify new opportunities that we might introduce to market.
How far is the geographical reach of your business?
We have 12 branches across the UK. We cover almost all of England. We have one branch in Newcastle that covers Scotland, Bristol covers Exeter and Cornwall, that area, so pretty much everywhere. Collection is one side of it, but we also have a very strong distribution network. We have about 155 trucks on the road. We can reach anywhere and everywhere that we want to.
Do you have an e-commerce site for your customers? How is that performing?
We have had it since 2010. At the moment, 75% of our sales turnover is coming from online sales. And that is through either the JJ app, available on Android and iOS, or the website. We also still have the conventional telesales function. We also offer pay by bank, to our customers. I think we were the first to offer that as an alternative to credit cards. We are in the process of offering pay by bank at the counters, maybe we’ll be the first company to offer pay by bank in person.
How digital is JJ Foodservice as a business, and do you offer any IT support for your members e.g. ordering apps, online support, delivery tracking?
You don’t need to be a member. You need to sign up but anyone can do it. It’s a very easy process, in five minutes you can become a customer of JJ. But pretty much everything is digital. We have an ordering app and website. There is online chat support. We estimate the time of arrivals. We inform the customer in the morning when the orders are being dispatched and then we send another email when we are nearby to pinpoint the estimated time of arrival. We don’t invoice the customers beforehand, it’s at the delivery point so there’s no need for a credit note or anything like that. If there is any problem with the product, we can just take it off the invoice there before we deliver. We try to digitise everything really because that brings efficiency. Our warehouses are paperless, we don’t pick with paper. We try to digitise almost everything.
How many products does JJ Foodservice supply and what categories do you cover?
We have over 3000 product lines and we cover everything: chilled, frozen, ambient food, pretty much everything a restaurant or food outlet would need.
Are there any new products in the ranges you want to talk about?
We are very big on our own brand. I think 40% of our product is our own brand. The beauty of it is we have the control of the quality and the supply chain and we can pass the savings to our customers. At the moment, after the plastic packaging tax, we are focusing heavily on sustainable and eco-friendly packaging. We have a big JJ branded range, there is cleaning materials, JJ branded, that was a big push. In the Asian market there are new products that we are acquiring through Gatelands, it will be 100 new free product lines, predominantly for the Asian market.
What is JJ Foodservice doing in the areas of sustainability and corporate social responsibility?
Last year, we installed 11,000 solar panels on all of our 12 branches. That will generate about 3.8 million kilowatt hours a year of electricity. We don’t have any more gas-powered warehouse trucks, everything is electric. We have paperless warehouses. Eco friendly packaging is very important, not only because of the plastic tax, but the range has paper based and sugar cane based products.
On social value, we have something called JJ Charity Friend. It’s a guide that we prepared and then we have charity partners across the UK. And we grant each JJ employee a day to volunteer on a social responsibility project. It could be befriending an elderly person or reading books to children or litter picking.
We also have a zero-waste initiative. We have a partnership with FareShare, so nothing goes to waste. So if there’s anything that needs to be shifted, through our partnership with FareShare, we make sure that it goes to where it is needed most.
How has the wholesale industry changed in recent years?
There were a lot of challenges on the supply chain but that made stock availability and service levels very important because companies that were struggling with the supply chain didn’t have the right product at the right time at the right price and that ultimately becomes an issue for a customer. That was the one of the biggest changes in the supply chain.
Also, I think you have to become a one stop shop for your customers. So, in terms of focusing on one area, I don’t think it’s doable enough or viable enough for a company. So, diversification on your product offering is very important. Hence, we want to increase our product range by 50%, whether it’s acquiring new companies or targeting new sectors or new brands, bringing new products in.
So that’s also important, customers want to have a one stop solution. And lastly, I think technology is not an investment anymore, it’s the norm so if you don’t have the right technology to offer your customers, you will be struggling a lot because that’s the norm, so your customers expect you to have at least an online presence or ease of use or you need to streamline your processes. Because by doing that you can pass your savings to your customers. There’s a big shift to sustainability, not because it is the right thing to do, I think it also commercially makes sense to be a sustainable business, on every front, environmental, people and financial sustainability for you to survive. Sustainability now is almost a requirement for every contract or tender that you got into, in schools you have to really prove your sustainable goals and then achieve them. I think in the future, food outlets will look for sustainable foodservices.
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