Feeding a nation of shoppers
Published: 06 October, 2011
Shop. Eat. Live.
The drinking and dining offer in the retail industry was always going to evolve, but in the last 20 years, since Shopping Centre launched, the business of feeding and quenching the thirst of shoppers has shifted from a secondary consideration to a much more significant part of the offer and revenue for a retail destination.
The Ridings, Wakefield, is generally acknowledged as the first shopping centre in the UK to install a bespoke American-style food court nearly a decade after the world’s first successful one was installed by the Rouse company in the Paramus Park mall in New Jersey, USA.
Barbara Winston, who is now centre manager of the 395,000- sq ft centre, recalls visiting the Ridings as a shopper just after it opened 28 years ago.
“It was massive,” Winston recalls. “Back then people were coming from all over to see what was a three level centre with 100 units. It was just completely different and the food court was laid out in a big semi-circle with a central seating area around a fish pond. It was like nothing we had seen before and it was really nice,” she remembers.
It was all a far, far cry away from the former stalwart of British catering, the Lyons teahouses that had dominated the high street scene but declined in the 1960s and eventually closed in 1981.
Over the following years the importance of food courts moved to the fore until the late 1990s when developments such as the nautically-themed Orient at Trafford Centre (which at 1,600 seats created Europe’s largest shopping centre food court and tried to mimic a cruise liner) and the Oasis Dining Quarter at Meadowhall, truly brought the spotlight to the food factor in the retailing experience.
Capital Shopping Centre’s Lakeside in Essex would remodel its Pavilion foodcourt and incorporate one into the Boardwalk which opened in 2007, and Westfield London with its deconstructed food court, and open-facing Southern Terrace, would also go on to set new standards.
Eating while shopping had come of age
Among the early consultants on the scene was Peter Burholt, managing director of independent management and catering consultancy Peter Burholt Partnership, who created his first food court in Southend.
From there the company, founded in 1974, went on to deliver a dozen more UK developments. However, in the early days of food court development, Burholt says that he and his colleagues faced some attitudinal challenges.
“Initially there seemed to be a view that we should just adopt the US approach to food courts and the attitude was ‘This happens in the US and this is what we should do in the UK’,” he recalls. “What people hadn’t thought about was the actual translation of the product and service to this country.”
“Additionally, there was an early view – ‘there’s a space – make it work’,” he adds. “But then we had an opportunity to create a bespoke 400-seat food court in the Pavillions centre, Birmingham, on the top floor. Everyone was initially critical because of where it was. But we thought about getting customers to it and we introduced proper china and cutlery.
The client – a pension fund- supported our vision and it was a great success and also put up the centre’s average spend. Today I think it has expanded to about 550 seats. After that we followed with centre food courts in Basildon, Aberdeen, Sutton, Shrewsbury, Reading, Coventry and Ilford.”
Burholt found, however, that some other centre owners and developers had unrealistic ‘we want to stick a food court in there’ expectations.
“Some locations could not take a food court,” he says. “We persuaded some people to do a restaurant cluster instead and we backed away from other projects. One went ahead anyway but they pulled out of it after two years.”
And he feels that in those days, food courts were seen very much in a local context.
“Our clients were pension funds and insurance companies,” he remembers. “At the time they were focused on local traders – so-called ‘ma and pa’ operators. Reflecting back on it after 20 years, it was my view that this was the landlords’ way of putting some local benevolence back into the commercial world,” Burholt says.
Among Burholt’s employees in those early days was Jonathan Doughty. Within two years of Shopping Centre launching, Doughty would depart to start his own business, Coverpoint Catering Consultancy. Doughty says that, in the last 20 years, there hasn’t been an evolution but a revolution in catering offers and its importance to the shopping experience.
“It’s the difference between Terminator and Terminator Salvation,” Doughty, also a film buff, says by way of comparison. “In 1991 branded food was just around the corner. We had branded food in the high street but the early 1990s were the beginning of branded food in shopping centres.
Those operators taking space during that time were ahead of the curve in learning that space in a shopping centre was even better than the high street because in the shopping centre there was activity and centres attracted very crystallised customer bases.”
And, as always, the customer was crucial to food court success: “In essence, the arrival of brands in food courts was a step change for the industry with customers falling in love with brands,” Doughty adds.
“As a shopping nation we were entering a phase with ‘yuppies’ and technology, and newly-branded food offers fitted that ethos extremely well.”
Doughty cites The Trafford Centre in Manchester, which opened in September 1998, and Bluewater in Kent, which opened in March 1999, as the real period of personal step change and, indeed, a change in public perception of eating while shopping.
“That was an amazing and slightly schizophrenic point because in a period of six months both opened,” he says. “They were at polar opposites in terms of location and in delivery. At Trafford, we were given massive autonomy with John Whittaker, founder and chairman of centre owner Peel Holdings, saying: “You tell us what you want and that will be the future”.
At Bluewater there was this Australian management way of doing things and nobody in the UK quite knew how to take it. Our team was switching from one mode to another. In the end it was the delivery of two schemes with about 3m sq feet with 15-16 per cent of that dedicated to food.”
In that period of time ‘food’ established itself as a leisure destination in its own right,” Doughty says.
“I can remember hosting BCSC and other groups and showing them these two projects, telling them they included circa 250,000 sq ft of food and that we expected people to even come and eat in the evening. They would look at you like you were mad! Trafford’s delivery in particular helped rewrite the rulebook in that sense. Up to that point it was always peripatetic. Food and drink has moved from a sideline to the organic social glue that holds the whole offer together.”
“One thing that hasn’t changed is that people need to refuel,” agrees Burholt. “You may have driven an hour and then be in the centre for three or four hours. People need to eat and drink. They need to socialise as well.”
Burholt believes that the catering in the retail environment has developed in five areas:
1. Customer demand for improved quality.
2. Presence of brands – they are more and more important.
3. Wider choice of menu and service style.
4. Landlord desires for improved and guaranteed returns.
5. Landlord reduced investment requirements as brands fit-out to their specifications.
“Westfield London has fulfilled a lot of those developments,” he says. “I see more and more restaurant operations in the future as part of a conglomeration of compatible activities as given land shortages.”
Today Burholt’s company has evolved to provide food service consultancy to the likes of Price Waterhouse Coopers, Radisson Hotels and other global clients. It recently completed the mini mall at St. Thomas’s Hospital in London which has 19,000 people a day coming through the front door.
“Some 20 years ago it was predicted that humans would be eating pills rather than meals by now. That hasn’t happened. It will never happen. People need refueling and socialising.”
Doughty’s Coverpoint business has grown to encompass work in 46 countries. Doughty has recorded food court and catering data for nearly 20 years that, he says, has helped make the business a science. He believes the rise of branded food courts and offers has paced far greater customer growth and sophistication about food and regional, national and international food offers.
“In terms of making money the UK shopping centre industry is a fairly finely-tuned instrument,” he says. “There’s a lot of stuff going on out there in the catering and food service sector that is really fantastic. Customers travel the world more and know more.
“In the old days it was sticky rice and deep-fried chicken balls. Now we can get a truly international variety as well as regionally-oriented offers.
As for his own predictions for the future, Doughty thinks food operator leases may have to be shorter to change with the changing cuisine trends. This will not be good news for landlords, who see the catering arena as the one remainig bastion of the long occupational lease.
So what else does Mystic Jonathan see coming? “I also predict that British cafés and British cooking and real baking will make a come-back,” he says. “What I call ‘like-Mum-used-to-make-it’ offers. The food service sector not only fulfills an important need but we have the ability to excite and delight.”
