Q Catering is Kent’s leading independent catering supplier and has been proudly supplying caterers in the South East with complete foodservice solutions for the last 20 years.
The company is known for its tailored service and providing solutions to its customers.
It is constantly expanding its high-quality range of chilled, ambient, and frozen products as well as offering food packaging and cleaning essentials; many sourced from a variety of local and national suppliers.
Steve Clarke, Managing Director, Q Catering, tells Wholesale Manager what he wants to achieve in the role and how the wholesale industry has changed in recent years.
Where have you worked before and what roles have you worked in?
I have been in foodservice for most of my working life. My employer previously to this one was a company called Kent Frozen Foods over in Aylesford and I worked there for just over 25 years. My role there was purchasing and marketing director and I had complete control over the procurement and the marketing function. They were sold to Cisco and I had an earnout period which came to an end during Covid. I left during that first summer of Covid and briefly flirted with retirement but realised I was too young and became too bored to retire. So I was looking for another opportunity. I was aware of Q Catering, that was another wholesaler that was in our area. And I knew Roger, the owner at that stage, was looking for an exit strategy as he got closer to retirement. I guess you could say it was one of the positives that came out of Covid, that I was in the market to do something, he was looking for an exit strategy and we were able to come up with a mutually acceptable plan for me to buy a controlling share in the business.
What does your current role involve?
I am an owner and a managing director. I have been in a business of this size when KFF was this size. So for me it was familiar, but also challenging because I almost had to go back to the beginning and start again and that’s no disrespect to what went before, it was just setting the foundations after Covid, resetting everything. I guess I am building on what was here before, but also building for the future. My primary strategy initially was investment. That was investment in people, investment in infrastructure, and also vehicles because there are extremely long lead times for getting hold of vehicles. So we have to be ahead of the curve. What I didn’t want to do is start to grow and then falter because we ran out of space. That’s the worst thing that can happen. In freezer and chilled we more than doubled our capacity and in ambient we became more efficient in what we were doing. What I wanted to do was build on that growth and I set myself a strategy to hit £20 million turnover by 2030. Without tempting fate, I’m ahead of what I planned. Now I’m having to look ahead again and look at the opportunity to secure another unit here where we are because I need to extend the freezer yet again, way ahead of my initial target of 2030. Again, that’s a good problem to have. We have replaced all of the vehicles that we had coming out of Covid so the fleet is all brand new. That was my original role, just getting the business ready for what the future held. I needed to build a team around me that I could trust and help me with my aspirations and goals. So I brought in an FD, Nick Jennings, who was my old FD at Kent Frozen Foods, and my sales director and my commercial director I worked with before in my previous role. So I’ve got a team now which means that I can focus a little bit more on strategy, a little bit more on the future development of the business. And I know that the general day to day running of the business is in safe hands. What I haven’t given up is the procurement element because I still enjoy that. So I still have a core number of suppliers that I tend to look after on a daily basis.
What are your goals for what you want to achieve in the role?
Growth strategy is what we’re all about. I recognise the need for a strong independent wholesaler in the South East of England. There are a lot of independents being snapped up by larger businesses. We wholeheartedly believe in the role that the independent plays in the marketplace. And we know through some of our customers that we serve that they like that personal service, they like being a customer, a person rather than just a number on the ledger. It’s that personal service that an independent can give and that reaction that you can give to their requirements very quickly, which the bigger guys can’t.
How is Q Catering performing as a business?
A big financial investment has gone in the front end. I’m pleased to say in this financial year, which is 2023/24, we’re tracking anywhere between 30 and 35% up on the previous year, it’s good. We’ve had a very good year. We’re not complacent, we know that our customers are struggling. So we know we have to be competitive on price. And we’re not going to shy away from that. It is a very competitive market so we’re not taking anything for granted at this moment in time. So what we tend to do is just keep it simple. Our strategy is to just do the basics really well, we make sure that our stock availability is high. At the moment, we’re at 99.5% stock availability. It’s having the product there when they want it. It’s delivering the goods first time in full when they want it. It’s offering the extra service that they want. We launched an evening telesales this year, that is a person on the phone up until 10 o’clock at night for next day delivery. People can talk to somebody if they want to talk to somebody. If they don’t want to talk to somebody, we’ve got online ordering as well up until 10 o’clock at night. We’re trying to fine tune that proposition that we give our customers and make sure that we’re totally in tune with what they want so we can give them the type of service that they require.
What benefits does Q Catering get from being part of Caterforce?
Caterforce for me is a known entity. When I was at KFF, we were part of Caterforce prior to Cisco. When they approached me after I got involved with Q, it was a perfect fit for us. There’s quite clearly a financial benefit there. For us buying as a combined group, we like to think we command a better price. Just to give you some perspective, that projected turnover for 2024 for all of the members is just over £800 million. So we take that combined turnover and try to leverage that for making sure that we’re getting competitive prices. So that’s very much a benefit for us. But it’s also the support that Caterforce give us: digital marketing, they manage the rebates that we have in place with our suppliers, food trends, product development, all of that sort of thing that you would have a marketing department for, they can help us with that as well. We’re able to use their photography studio, so we can get all of our photography done through the group. But equally as important is that collaboration between the members, it’s being able to talk to a like-minded wholesaler about the problems or what you’re seeing in the market or to compare KPIs. People can be very open, rather than guarded. So you can benchmark yourselves against others in the same marketplace and that is extremely valuable for us.
How is your B2B eCommerce site performing?
We changed to a company called SwiftCloud over the summer. We are currently going through the integration process; we can generate up to 20% of our turnover online and I know there’s a lot more to come. But I’m on the fence with online ordering. I do like the old-fashioned telesales as well. And a lot of customers do like that interaction with somebody on a daily basis. With the schools contracts we have, it’s nice when they’re placing an order, and maybe they’ve forgotten something and we can prompt them by saying ‘Don’t forget it’s fish & chip Friday. Have you got enough fish?’ You lose that in translation with online. It’s very transactional, it’s very functional and without a shadow of a doubt has a place and we have customers that will only order online, but we very much have customers that will also want to talk to somebody. It’s a little bit like brochures, we still print brochures because we still have customers that say they want something physically in their hand to look at rather than looking online. I think you’ve got that blend of old and new, I think there’s still a place for both sides to be honest.
How many products does Q Catering supply and what categories do they cover?
We cover pretty much everything, we have just under 2,500 products across frozen, chilled, ambient and non-food. Our customers spend right across the whole gamut. We’re very strong in schools, we do pubs, restaurants, hotels, fast food cafes. We’re probably like any other wholesaler in range, but we also very much focus on local sourcing. A big plus point for us is Kentish produce and making sure that we’re trying to source locally where we can. I’m on the board of Produced In Kent as well so there’s a bit of a tie-in with that, it’s a bit of a passion for me. We like to work with exclusive Kentish suppliers if we can and very much back them and push their produce throughout the county.
Are there any new products in the ranges you want to talk about?
We launched a Kentish apple and caramel pudding company called The Finest Cake Company. That uses Kentish apple, it’s made locally and it’s a very good quality product. That has been quite a successful launch for the winter. It’s a multi portion product, so when you cut it up into squares and cook it, it looks like it’s homemade, and the quality is of a homemade quality as well. That is something that we’ve particularly had success with recently.
How has the wholesale industry changed in recent years?
Post-Covid, I think it has got tougher and that’s for a lot of reasons. The supply chain was compromised early on, coming back out of Covid it was very difficult to get products when you want them and have that degree of reliability from your suppliers. Maybe it was always like this, but I think the weather has an increased impact on what we do. With anything that grows in the ground, it’s never the right temperature or it rains too much or too little. It just seems to be absolutely everything at the moment. You’ve seen pictures of flooded fields where they can’t harvest potatoes and vegetables, so I think that price instability is tough for us but tough for our customers as well. They’re struggling to put prices up because they’re worried that they’re going to lose customers. So price is an issue more than ever. That instability of supply chain is getting better, but it still can be difficult to manage. Next year, I think it’s going to be more of the same, I don’t see it getting any easier next year. Even when interest rates start to come back, I think it’s still going to be challenging, which means that you have to work harder at absolutely everything else that you do. So, for me price is very important, but it’s everything else that you can do around that price to help the customer, I think that’s the most important thing.
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