Reflections by Joshua Simons – co founder
Written on Monday 3oth December 2024
As the year comes to a close, I thought I’d take a moment to reflect on what has been an exciting, busy, and rewarding 2024. From new milestones to community initiatives, partnerships, and a few surprises, this year has been one for the books.
I’m currently sitting at my kitchen table (AKA my office) on my laptop and, aptly, have just taken delivery of my favourite C&B lunch dish via our trusty friends at Deliveroo. For those that are interested, my go-to is very simple – a freshly made C&B Chicken Caesar Salad alongside a cold can of diet coke. It always seems to hit the spot – kudos to our Head of Food, Glen, for developing this dish – it’s truly restaurant-quality, with its dressing meticulously made in-house, and has become very popular. If you try it for the first time after reading this recommendation, let me know!
In January each year, we hire a conference room and invite our management teams to join us for our most important meeting of the year – a chance to talk about the good, the bad and the ugly from the previous year, and importantly to present and propose the plans and projects for the year ahead. We then have a detailed discussion, gather thoughts from the team through our Group Operations Manager, Mark Brown, and formalise the upcoming year’s projects around a week later. We then get to work, meeting up quarterly to ensure we haven’t strayed too far from our agreed actions. We also have weekly Zoom calls with each team, which we call our ‘WBRs’ – Weekly Business Reviews – which enable us to solve problems for the teams as we go, and announce anything new that wasn’t on our original plan. It’s good to have a plan, but from our experience, plans are always subject to change – see the global pandemic for details!
The overriding message to the team was that 2024 was going to be ‘the year of product innovation, with a continued focus on quality operations, training, and delivering 5* guest experiences’. A short sentence to write, but one that equaled a big challenge, with multiple objectives.
Myself and Steve left the meeting feeling invigorated, proud and excited that we had sat around the table with such a talented group of hospitality professionals that represent the brand so well, uphold our standards on the frontline, and have that ‘this is how we do things around here’ attitude to quality-control. Many of our team have been with us for 5+ years – and some for over 10 years! It felt like we had come a long way since the days of our shop in Boscombe, where looking back, we were more than a little rough around the edges – but as always, and as I write this today – we feel like we’ve only just begun with C&B, and have so much more to do.
Well, it’s time to talk about how the year transpired – some good stuff, and some lessons to be had!
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🍗 300,000 Meals Served In 2024
This year, we hit a major milestone, serving over 300,000 meals in a year, for the first time in Chicken & Blues history. The question of how many meals have been served is an important talking point in every Weekly Business Review – the reason for this is that everyone understands that number – it doesn’t get skewed like total revenue numbers do by menu prices going up or down – it’s a simple number and the idea is that we grow the ‘total meals sold’ number over time, improving ‘throughput’ without ever compromising on product quality, service, or hospitality.
It’s tough out there for the restaurant industry at the moment, so the fact we’re serving more meals than ever is testament to the team’s hard work, and the loyal support of our patrons across Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole. Thanks!
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🏆 Deliveroo Success
To put our partnership with Deliveroo into some perspective, our restaurants across the region cook over 4,000 meals per week which are delivered by Deliveroo’s rider fleet. These days, our teams know many of the riders by first name; they exchange gifts and write Christmas cards to each other – they’re essentially an important extension of our team. We value the relationship highly and hope our patrons are happy, the vast majority of the time, with the delivery service provided. Ensuring freshly-cooked and made-to-order food reaches its destination in an average of 28 minutes from order-to-door is an incredibly complex challenge and one our teams work hard on every day to execute.
2024 kicked off with a bang as we proudly won a National Deliveroo Award, recognising us as one of the top-performing restaurant brands in the UK and naming us ‘Best Chicken Restaurant in Southern England & Wales’. We have won a few awards over the last 10+ years, but this one felt like one seriously worth winning. The trophy is currently displayed on a shelf in my lounge, however, we’re having a special cabinet built and it will be displayed along with our other awards in one of the restaurants, with the team, where it should be.
Later in the year, our Southern Fried Chicken Wrap was named one of Deliveroo’s Top 20 Most Popular Dishes in the UK and ranked #1 in Bournemouth, Christchurch, and Poole. Again, an awesome result for us and goes to show how popular that particular wrap is. There are over 1,400 combinations of wraps, add-ons and sauces at C&B, but the Southern Fried Wrap with Smokey BBQ Sauce takes the honours! My co-founder Steve usually goes for the Tex Mex with Chipotle and Halloumi – it seems everyone has their favourite wrap combo, with no two wraps the same!
Our year with Deliveroo ended on a high – we signed a new and exclusive 3-year partnership and look forward to continuing to grow the delivery side of the business, with a continued focus on accuracy and speed using Deliveroo’s substantial data and analytics. Some of the best minds in technology work at Deliveroo HQ – the data they provide continues to help us improve service to patrons over the course of time.
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🌟 Celebrity & Sporting Collaborations
We teamed up with some fantastic brands and partners this year, including AFC Bournemouth for a 3-part Youtube series, Chris Billam-Smith for a charity special raising funds for Bournemouth Food Bank, and rappers Tyrone and Big Zuu for a Hot Honey Wing special to celebrate the stocking of Drip Water across all C&B restaurants. Each collaboration brought something unique to our menu for a limited time, and we loved seeing your reactions.
AFC Bournemouth Series: Click HERE
Chris Billam-Smith Collab: Click HERE
Tyrone and Big Zuu Special: Click HERE
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🤣 April Fools’ Prank
It’s the first time we have planned an April Fools, and we’d like to thank Lewis Mack, a locally-based videographer, for helping us put together our April Fools’ Drone Delivery prank, which gave some people a laugh (and definitely fooled a few of you!). I received an email only recently from someone I know introducing me to a London-based technology company. ‘This is Josh, he is part of Chicken & Blues – it’s worth you guys hooking up as C&B are already doing drone delivery in Bournemouth’. I had to let them both down lightly and remind my friend that the video was posted on April 1st. D’oh!
I’m tempted to tell the team we’re retiring from April Fools jokes after last year’s effort.
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🍳 C&B Breakfast Trial
We ventured into new territory this year with a breakfast menu trial across 3 months, and while it was a hit, we’re taking a little time to refine it, with the goal to present more variety and extensions that tick more boxes for more people. Think quality coffee and juices alongside American-inspired Waffles, Pancakes, Toasts, Hot Pots, and the like.
Our signature Breakfast Wrap and Coffee Shake went down a storm, but we must do more if we’re going to achieve what we want to achieve with C&B breakfast. We would eventually like it to be available 7 days per week from 8am-11am across all restaurants, with a particular focus on becoming the best at breakfast delivery. We’ll get there, but there’s more work to do before we can say ‘Goodbye Maccy Ds!’.
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🧀 Mac & Cheese: Lessons
We decided, after our ‘year of innovation’ chat in January, to put a traditional homemade Mac & Cheese on the menu. We proceeded to try many different styles and recipes and got ourselves pretty excited about it. ‘This is going to be so popular’ I remember saying in our final tasting with the team. We signed it off pretty quickly, got our new menus printed, and got it out there.
Frustratingly, it became apparent that whilst the dish was working nicely for dine-in guests, there were issues with product consistency and integrity on some takeaways/deliveries, particularly when the travel-time was over 25 minutes. We called an emergency meeting after multiple patrons sent us pictures and video clips over the first few days to let us know the dish wasn’t right.
We ran some further delivery tests and decided that the product wasn’t meeting our brand standards – and so it had to come off the menu immediately. It was a tough call as we had announced the launch to our Reward Program members, amongst 1000s of others on social media.
At the end of the day, quality assurance is everything to us, and our rather expensive lesson here is to ensure that, for future launches, rigorous testing is carried out on extended travel times. As it turns out, many patrons drive in for C&B pickups that live or work 45+ minutes away!
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❤️ Neighbourhood Fund
This year, we chose Bournemouth Food Bank as our charity of the year. Giving back to the community is at the heart of the brand of C&B, and we’re proud to help those in need when we can.
For the first time, we executed a ‘kitchen takeover’ on Father’s Day at Bournemouth Food Bank to give lots of local families a nice lunch with the family, on us. And with donations made by our suppliers, we were able to deliver a bundle of gift boxes to the Food Bank, who in turn distributed them to local families in time for Christmas. We look forward to making a solid donation to Bournemouth Food Bank in January after our year of fundraising and merchandise sales, which all contribute.
Most recently, we completed one of our biggest giveaways yet, with up to 5,000 C&B Juniors Meals being made available to local families that registered online, with no strings attached.
When you buy from C&B, we want you to know that you’re buying from a local independent company that redistributes money and energy into helping the neighbourhoods in which we trade from. It means alot to us, and we couldn’t do it without the loyal support of C&B Patrons across BCP.
More info.
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🌟 Lastly, Celebrating Our Team
I wanted to mention a couple of internal promotions. Cat and Dom both work at our Christchurch branch. Cat has moved to General Manager after starting as an assistant, and Dom has recently been promoted to Kitchen Supervisor, now working under the watchful eye of Kitchen Manager, Jos, who happens to be his mum!
Their hard work and dedication have paid off and we look forward to seeing them, and many others within the company, continue to progress and grow. Congratulations to both of you—you’ve earned it.
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Thank You
Finally, from myself and Steve, thank you for being part of our journey this year. Whether you dined in, ordered in, or supported our community initiatives, you’ve made this year truly special. Thank you our teams. Thank you to our suppliers and partners. And thank you to our families for putting up with our obsession!
Here’s to 2025, which I think will be a progressive one for Chicken & Blues.
Actually, I better get writing the presentation and proposals for January’s annual meeting!
Best wishes,
Josh 🙂
Joshua Simons
Co-founder
Chicken & Blues
Email: josh@chickenandblues.com
