ray corrie, head of food development, metropolitan pub company
What do you do when the government closes your pubs at short notice? Head Of Food Development for Metropolitan Pub Company, Ray Corrie, helped turn his pubs into shops...
I’m not very good at relaxing, so when pubs closed in March 2020, I wasn’t one of those who got into Netflix or reading books. I’ve worked in kitchens, with food, chefs and suppliers for over 30 years and I’m a do-er, so didn’t enjoy not working.
Thankfully, in early April I got a call from my boss, Michael Horan, managing director of Metropolitan Pub Company. We operate 61 pubs across London and are known for our excellent food, so Michael’s call was asking for ideas for ways to keep the pubs alive and bring some team members out of furlough.
We talked about offering customers ‘make at home’ boxes with recipe sheets and all the ingredients you needed to make our classic dishes, like Charter Pie. I thought we could extend this by bringing some of our chefs out of furlough to run a takeaway food service for customers who were fed up with cooking. People were stuck at home and were cooking more than ever: they were going banana bread and sourdough mad, and supermarkets were running out of flour and yeast as everyone was baking their own bread.
I called around suppliers: they had the ingredients that were in short supply in supermarkets, like flour and yeast, so as well as offering takeaways, why not turn empty pub spaces into food shops and provide a service to local communities? We’d be bringing customers back in, creating a bit of a buzz and giving people a chance to engage with their local pub again. Plus, we could sell draught beer as a takeaway service, as we’d be operating as a shop.
Ready to shop
At that time there were no fruit, veg, meat or fish markets operating, so I got on the phone and asked the question: is this feasible? I spoke to suppliers to allay any fears and explained how we would work safely, choosing pubs that were large enough for social distancing and using a small team to manage everything, including putting one-way systems in place with one door for entry and another to exit. Suppliers thought it was a great idea. We got the green light to go ahead and had literally days to sort out the logistics. We planned it so that pubs offered takeaway food on a rota basis, so that suppliers could fulfil orders and drivers could limit their contact to a handful of pubs each day, rather than driving around them all.
Flying in a fortnight
There were other issues, too: the whole country was also going wild for takeaways, because no one could go out. This meant a shortage of containers and boxes – you couldn’t get a plastic pint container for love nor money. If they’d wanted to, our suppliers could have hiked the price right up, but they didn’t: instead, they found exactly what we needed so we could open in just a few days.
I wanted the pubs to look like olde worlde food markets with a customer journey that had a sense of flow. Suppliers provided wooden crates and coffee bean sacks so that we could display produce in a rustic food hall kind of way. We were ready to open our shop doors in just two weeks… but we had no idea how the pop-up shop-in-a-pub concept would be received.
It went amazingly well. Alongside flour we offered takeaway coffee, charcuterie, premium smoked salmon, wines, readymixed cocktails, really great quality fresh produce and pastries to the people of neighbourhoods like Crouch End, Kensal Rise and Fulham. And everything flew off the shelves. I remember people coming in and whispering, ‘Got any yeast?’ like it was some kind of under-the-counter contraband. But they loved that they could come in for the baking ingredients they couldn’t find in the supermarket, then wander home with a takeaway pint, as well.
Our takeaway services were a huge winner, too. People became bored with being stuck at home and creating three meals a day, so they ordered a pub meal online to enjoy at home, instead. Our roast dinners were our biggest sellers – we could have sold those several times over. Demand for all our classic dishes was so great that in the end we signed up to Deliveroo so that customers could get our pub meals delivered to their door.
The shops and takeaway services were so busy that general managers had to control the flow of customers, for safety’s sake. People were popping in regularly for everything from a freshly squeezed juice or a takeaway cocktail to a croissant and a good chat. It meant that locals working from home or furloughed were discovering our pubs for the very first time and the atmosphere was fantastic. These ideas really brought the pubs back to being what they should be: a community hub. It was hard work, but I’m really chuffed that the team pulled it off. And I believe we found new customers, too.