Tossed, the healthy eating chain, will open its eighth London site in September this year, however further expansion remains held back by a lack of suitable sites, says the chain’s owner, Vincent McKevitt, writes Lorraine Heller. The chain, which serves healthy, made-to-order fast food, had announced plans to open 25 sites by 2013 further to securing a £1.5m development fund at the start of last year. However, McKevitt said the chain has “struggled to find sites” that are a good match to its formula. “There were not a huge amount of sites around last year, which is a shame because we had all this money,” he told M&C Report’s sister publication BigHospitality. “Central London is a micro market, and in our space there are a lot of people that are still expanding in the lunch market.” “It’s about finding the right venues. Our sites are quite expensive to kit out so we can’t afford to not get the right ones.” The chain, which opened its first venue in 2005, is now present in seven locations around London, primarily in the West End. The first City location, in Leadenhall Street, opened this spring, while the next site to open will be in the Westfield Stratford shopping centre in East London. McKevitt said he hopes to open one more site by the end of this year, although nothing has yet been signed. He added that he has no plans to take the chain outside of London for the time being. “Why go elsewhere when you can open 100 sites in London? Operationally, it makes more sense to focus on one area.” “We’re quite lucky because Tossed has quite a wide appeal – it works well in tourist areas, business areas and shopping areas.” Over the past year, McKevitt said the business has focused on refurbishing sites where necessary, building up a head office team, and improving operations to maximise profits. “We changed our operational flow quite drastically. The biggest problem with our model is that we make food to order. We’re offering people 70-odd ingredients, with service between 12 and 2pm. By going into a big site (Leadenhall), we had to think about how to serve 300 people in an hour,” he said. “We made huge improvements in our model over the last year, which made it more profitable.”

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