The Garden Centre Group is revamping its entire food and beverage offering including a branded coffee shop that could be introduced to high street stores.
That is according to F&B director for the group Jason Dangier Speaking at the 2015 M&C Allegra Foodservice’s Restaurant Conference, who said the group has ambitions to grow the Coffee Ground brand both at garden centres and new locations.
The group has more than 150 garden centres and ambitions to add more with “a war chest that could take over a country”, according to Dangier.
He said The Garden Centre Group, which is part of Wyevale, has acquired 10 new garden centre sites this year and is on track to add a further 10 in 2016 with a revamped food and drink offering in each.
So far it has upgraded 65 cafes to Coffee Ground in the last year and has a further 20 to complete and is looking for opportunities for the brand beyond the garden centres.
Dangier said: “Coffee Ground has legs; we think it could be picked up and put into another retailer. We could do it in half the time and at half the price of other coffee shop brands.”
He said the group is in talks with a number of retailers about this opportunity.
In larger spaces, the Garden Centre Group includes Botanic Kitchen – the garden themed restaurant in its centres – these have opened in five centres with a further nine to be rebranded.
“Everytime we buy a garden centre we can see straight away where we would add a coffee shop or restaurant and we usually will have more than one.”
He said by positioning the restaurant at the back of the store people walk through the whole shop to reach it, which has contributed to an uplift of 54% over two years for the company’s in-store net promoter score (NPS) from 4%.
