When Blue Apple Catering was founded, directors Ruston and Brian set out to instil the passion and camaraderie of a busy restaurant kitchen in a workplace canteen setting. He shares what founders need to focus on to become a values-driven business.
“It’s all in the preparation and planning. If that isn’t in place before you start, and then things begin to go badly it’s much harder, if not impossible, to catch up and put it right.”
Ruston Toms, one of the founders of Blue Apple Catering, the independent contract caterers, could have been describing the importance of the role of a company’s values, and in a way he is. But it relates to his experiences in the kitchen.
“I trained as a chef originally and applied a kitchen mentality to how we formed the business,” he explains. “Ask any chef what they enjoy and it’s the camaraderie. It’s a reason why the team is called a brigade, with each function in the kitchen working seamlessly.”
Ruston met co-founder Brian Allanson when they were both were working in business development at the contract catering subsidiary of a PLC. “We both felt their business model was quite impersonal,” he says. “We were getting the customer on board, selling the dream, but then handing them over to other people in the organisation with the result that things got lost in translation.
“In 1998 after we had kept saying to each other we wanted to work in a business we could be proud of, we both borrowed £15,000, gave up the company cars, and started up from Brian’s front room.
“I’m not one for strap lines, but ‘food is our passion, people are our business’ is really our mantra.
“That’s more difficult to sustain when your business is in more than one place. We’re in 60 locations across the country, which is where having values really comes into play for the business.
“All staff have an app which brings everyone together to share experiences and ideas. Pictures are posted every day of dishes, and there are subsets such as the culinary group or the green ambassadors. So it’s easier for people to share how they are living our values.
“We call those values our Blue Apple Pips - passion, integrity, pride, sustainability. But I feel it is too corporate to present values as some kind of doctrine. Our values are really guides because intuitive behaviour based on those values is also important.
“Let’s look at how they influence recruitment. A new chef will work for a day on client premises alongside our team, who will then provide us with feedback not just about how well the chef performs in that environment but whether they really are a Blue Apple person.
“That isn’t something we are going to be able to gauge just from references and qualifications.”
Ruston’s point is that a company can’t take a passive approach to its values.
“I remember when we took over one particular contract with TUPE in place for the staff,” he explains, “and the incumbent provider telling us that we had got our work cut out with them. But nobody gets up in the morning intending to do a bad job, and if people don’t feel that what they are doing is appreciated, or if they have no opportunity for progressing, it’s likely they’ll just do the minimum.
“A company needs to think outside the box rather than being doggedly systematic, and values provide the parameters, as long as they are authentic.
“Passion then isn’t believable as a value for us if it doesn’t allow a chef to express that. It means they should have a licence to create, obviously within budget. Then it’s a demonstration of how a business model and its values synchronised.
“Similarly it’s populare for companies to state integrity as a value. However, this can become emotive when many low-margin businesses derive a proportion of their profit from supplier discounts. While that is the same for every other company in our sector, we communicate this to our clients.
“Values mean continuity because if you are working with like-minded customers and suppliers the relationship is more likely to be long-term.
“To sustain them we have the good old-fashioned employee of the month award which is based on our values, an employee assistance programme via a confidential helpline, company-funded advice from an IFA, all of which help to keep values to the fore because it’s harder to have a value about caring without initiatives to underpin it.”
And Toms can place a commercial value on the Blue Apple Catering values. He explains: “We had a contract with a manufacturer for numerous of their factories which they terminated because one of their major customers was one of the world’s biggest contract caterers which wanted to have a reciprocal arrangement with them. The rug was pulled from beneath us; there was nothing we could have done about it.
“After 18 months they came back to us with the addition of three more locations. Their reasons related to our values.”
Ruston concludes by noting that values have got to be evidence-based, “because any company can claim anything, and just because a set of values appear on website, it doesn’t mean they have any meaning.”
In a world of tight margins and casual employment, Blue Apple Catering stands out for bringing high street cafe culture to the workplace. And values are an essential ingredient for that vision.