The capital’s leading premium restaurant supplier, Woods Foodservice has acquired long established wholesaler John Mower in a multi-million-pound takeover.
The move will create one of the UK’s largest, premium restaurant purveyors, with over 3,000 customers who share upwards of 90 Michelin stars.
The business boasts an enviable client list including The Fat Duck, Gymkhana and The Ledbury, and the acquisition will see it take on even more culinary icons such as Harrods and Ramsay.
Darren Labbett, Managing Director of Woods Foodservice, tells Wholesale Manager more about the deal.
What attracted you to the John Mower business?
When I first took over Woods Foodservice, back in October 2000, the business wasn’t active in the fine dining quality end of the catering market. It was basically a smaller version of the more typical national wholesalers that tried to service everyone with everything, which I didn’t think was working for a company that was only turning over a million pounds. This was around the time when fine dining was becoming more popular, especially in London. The gastro pub had emerged in the late 1990s.
I knew that we could compete with anyone on service levels, but because of our small volumes, it was very difficult to compete on price with the big national boys, whereas at that time, price wasn’t so much of an issue in fine dining. So, I decided to concentrate on that area of the market and try and specialise in it.
I became very aware of who were the market leaders around that time. I would suggest that in London, John Mower were one of those market leaders. I followed them from that point onwards. As a result, I became friendly with Roy Tweed, who was the managing director and owner. We used to speak quite a lot, and we became friends, competitors, supplying a very similar customer base with a very similar range of products.
Just before Covid, because I knew that Roy was approaching old age. I tentatively contacted him and asked him if he would be interested in selling. Covid delayed everything and then we got back in contact about the acquisition a year ago.
What will the acquisition mean for Woods Foodservice in terms of your revenue?
We were expecting to hit the £40 million mark this year. The John Mower turnover is around £12 million. We’re hoping the combined turnover would be over £50 million. That will help significantly, because they’re all dry stores, their entire turnover is ambient, whereas our ambient turnover represents about 58% of our turnover. When you add the two ambient turnovers together, it’s a significant figure, and it will enable us to use that volume to make us more powerful in terms of speaking to manufacturers, growers, suppliers, etc. We’re convinced that the combined volumes, and the combined experience and knowledge will benefit both the Woods customers and the John Mower customers in terms of pricing, range, quality, etc.
Does Woods Foodservice exclusively focus on premium restaurants or is there a wider business?
Both Woods Foodservice and John Mower focus on the more premium restaurant trade. We include in that high end event caterers, wine bars, upmarket old people’s homes, hotels and gastro pubs. We don’t really go into casual dining or below. It’s usually Gastro Pub and above.
How is the premium restaurant market performing?
This last 12 months has seen tough trading conditions externally; there’s no doubt about that. Hospitality in general has been hit left, right and centre, with various cost increases. It’s a difficult time, but Woods has been growing at around 5% during that time, but we are having to work harder to achieve and then maintain that growth. We are growing and we are hitting our targets, but we are having to work a lot harder to do that.
What are some of the biggest challenges about operating in this market?
Our trucks are having to make more deliveries with less volume to reach the same turnover as last year. Clearly, there’s a higher cost to us, because all of the cost increases that our customers are experiencing, we are also experiencing so the challenge for us is the same as for our customers. It’s an increase in cost and we are having to work harder to bring in the revenue. National Insurance increases alone were significant. The economic and external pressures on our customers trickle down to us.
What geographical areas do you cover?
The bulk of our trade is in central London, but we also cover Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Edinburgh, Cambridge, Cardiff, Bristol and Brighton. We’re pretty much nationwide. We don’t cover the whole of the UK, but we cover most of the major cities and towns.
How many products do you supply, and what product categories do you cover?
In total, it’s about 15,000 but the categories are split. Our main categories are ambient and dry stores, but we also do a full range of dairy and chilled, which is our second biggest category. We do a small range of upmarket frozen products. We do fresh produce, which represents about 10% of our turnover. We do a small range of fresh meat, and we do a full range of tableware as well.
Are there any new products in the ranges you want to talk about?
We are in the process of introducing our own label called Spence, which is cupboard staples. We are trying to achieve an own label that’s unique to us, that is of the right quality for the customers that we supply, but at competitive prices, so that the customer has the reassurance of knowing they’re still getting the quality, but they’re also able to buy at prices that are competitive with anybody. Because we have acquired John Mower and we recently joined Caterforce, we’re very confident that we can achieve that.
We also have another brand which is unique to us, and that’s Edesia, a range of high-end Mediterranean products, including extra virgin olive oils, vinegars, olives, tahini, pesto, pomegranate and molasses.
What benefits do you get from being a member of Caterforce?
We joined Caterforce in August last year. It’s a perfect group. There are only 10 members, which are all like-minded, and they’re strategically positioned throughout the UK, so there’s no competition. There’s no real overlap. If we want help distributing in areas that we don’t cover, they can help with that, which is great. The overall turnover might not be as big as some other buying groups, but because it’s so concentrated all in the same sort of area, the prices that we pay are very competitive, which has really helped us.
How digital is your business?
It’s very digital. We’re very on board with all of that. We’ve invested over half a million pounds in our website over the last five years. We’ve had a WMS system for 10 years, we invest a lot in AI, and we’re developing AI all of the time.
For a very long time, we’ve known that technology is the key to being one step ahead of everyone else, and it’s helping us become more efficient and more competitive.
What can you do with AI?
Well, for example, we don’t process any orders at all manually. It’s either the website or AI, one way or the other, is digital. That’s on the sales side and on the purchasing side, we are in the process of removing all of the manual input there, including placing orders. A lot of work is going into that, matching invoices, goods in, pretty much everything on that side of things. A lot of things in the finance department are done by AI as well.
How would you say the wholesale industry has changed in recent years?
One of the biggest things I’ve noticed is that where there was a lot of independent, family run wholesalers in our niche area, the fine dining quality end of the market, they’ve all been bought by bigger groups. I don’t know of any in our bracket size that are still family owned. I think we must be the biggest family-owned wholesaler in the London area, supplying the niche customers that we supply. I can’t think of anyone else. That’s the thing I’ve noticed more than anything. You’ve got these big groups coming in and snapping up all these wholesalers.
There are also the advances in technology. The other thing is dealing with all these external pressures, which seems to have been one after the other, the last few years.
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