Practical thinking on scaling, sustainability, operations, and the infrastructure layer of the food industry. For restaurant groups, corporate caterers, and food manufacturers that want to do things properly.
Scale a food brand and a defining question arrives: make your product yourself, or pay someone else to make it? It’s a trade of volume, control and margin, and renting has changed the maths.
When you take commercial kitchen space, you'll be offered one of two things: a lease or a licence. They're not the same, but plenty of operators sign one without being sure how it differs from the other.
Most food waste isn't a bin problem. Nearly two-thirds of it is made in the kitchen before a customer sees the food, which is exactly where you can cut it.
The brand that sold you that parcel owns neither the warehouse it sat in nor the van that delivered it. The same shift is now reaching the production kitchen.
Three conditions make it happen: the infrastructure is capital-heavy, it's genuinely hard to run to a high standard, and it's not the thing your customers are buying. Food production has all three.
For a business supplying a supermarket, a wholesaler or a contract caterer, your buyer will require a recognised third-party certification before they'll place an order.
Most restaurants think they need a central production unit (CPU) far earlier than they actually do. Though a few do need one on day one. The trick is knowing which you are.
It's a question every food business periodically asks itself, and it turns a practical question about space into a board-level capital-allocation question: where should our money actually be working?
Most sustainability claims are statements of intent. The harder question is mechanical: what happens to the waste, the oil and the energy, and what was the cost of the building itself?
When an operator starts looking at units, the search almost always begins with the wrong number: square footage. How much space do we need? is the easy question, but not the most important.
Your rent is under half of what a self-managed kitchen actually costs. We break down the other half: rates, insurance, waste, servicing, and the bills that arrive years after you sign.
Building a London CPU costs around £682,500 upfront and takes over a year. Renting costs much the same per month, with no capital tied up and production live in two weeks. We run the real numbers.