Coco di Mama has gone from being a traditional bricks and mortar business focused on the central London market to having a nationwide proposition, according to Steve Holmes, chief executive, Azzurri Group. And it’s all down to the pandemic.
Due to the location of its sites and the customer demographic, around 90% of Coco Di Mama customers traditionally bought food to takeaway meaning the business was well placed to offer delivery.
But with all its Coco site shuttered since last March, Holmes said one of the team suggested they trial offering the brand for delivery through its Zizzi kitchens. It was trialled in five from December last year and “we were absolutely blown away by the level of demand”. “Our Southampton Zizzi restaurant was selling more Coco out of the kitchen on delivery than Zizzi,” he said, speaking at the Casual Dining Show last week.
The group has since rolled it out to 133 ASK and Zizzi sites across the country and has lined up other opportunities to licence the brand to other operators.
“It has given that whole business a completely different lens because instead of thinking about it as a city focused food to go offering, we are now a national brand with 133 delivery locations,” said Holmes.
He said the group was currently having “quite a few conversations” about licensing Coco Di Mama and even franchise opportunities both in the UK and internationally.
The Italian food to go pasta brand is still in the process of opening the doors of its sites, with the 15th Coco Di Mama due to reopen next Thursday as the City starts to recover. “We have been seeing very strong week-on-week growth since the kids went back to school.”
Holmes said it was important to be optimistic and look to the future and some of the positive things that could come out of the pandemic.
“Delivery was a real lifeline for us and now presents quite an exciting opportunity,” he said by example. Azzurri Group has seen delivery go from making up 4-5% of sales to 20-25%, but as the business had not been set up to offer delivery before, it’s been having to adapt to the shift in operating model.
Alongside the boost to delivery volumes, Holmes said he believed that due to consumers being time poor, the timeframe for the average casual dining experience had shrunk from 1hr to 1hr 15minutes to 45minutes to 1 hour.
Azzurri Group has responded to these two trends by investing in new technology in its kitchen that can cook any dish in a few minutes. He said at its new Zizzi in Westfield White City has been kitted out with the modest up to date kitchen equipment which resulted in every meal served between June and September last year being served in less than 12 minutes from when the order was taken.
“It has been transformational. We are now going to be rolling that out across the company over the next nine months,” he said. “We still want real chefs topping the pizza […] but that doesn’t mean we can’t use new equipment to cook things more quickly.”
