Esquires Coffee

Esquires Coffee is a global coffee franchise that’s all about exceptional coffee and superior customer service in a warm and friendly, environment. As an international operator, their reputation and growth is based on the quality of their organic, Fair Trade coffee, the expertise of their people, and the effectiveness of their partnership model.

In this case study, Aiden Keegan, National Operations Manager at Esquires Coffee, discusses the challenges presented by ongoing legislative pressures and provides detail on why Esquires has benefited from building a partnership with Nutritics to overcome this.

Esquires are focused on delivering the best possible service to customers, and when the new EU-wide allergen labelling regulations were introduced, they wanted not only to comply, but also to be transparent with customers about the allergen and nutrition content of the food served. They chose Nutritics as their software solution due to the range of functionality, large food databases and ease of use of the product. They appointed a “Nutritics Champion” to input recipe data into the software, a process that was completed within a few hours. The team now feel they can trust both the information provided and the Nutritics team behind it.

Recent customer satisfaction surveys have shown increased brand loyalty as a result of this initiative and all food safety inspections have been passed without issue.

“When the legislation that came into effect we wanted to show that our brand was being proactive when it came to compliance. We recognised the importance of providing customers with reliable and accurate information to prevent potentially fatal allergic reactions.

“Our main challenges were time and expertise. Undertaking this exercise ourselves would have resulted in our team spending a considerable amount of time gathering information from our product lines and suppliers, analysing this data and reproducing it in a legally complaint format. We don’t have any nutrition expertise in-house, so ensuring that our nutrition labelling is accurate also presented a challenge.”

“We began searching for a software solution to help us meet the requirements of the legislation, deliver it in a customer friendly format, reduce our workload and ensure the accuracy of our data.

“We carefully reviewed a number of recipe management software solutions on the market, but were continuously left disappointed with their distinct lack of usability and accuracy.”

“After careful review, we decided to roll out the Nutritics system across our network. The main reasons for this were:

• The range of functionality to analyse allergens, nutrition, costings and create SOPs
• The large food database, with a range of brands and niche foods
• Their support team that were willing to go the extra mile to assist us
• Their clear understanding of our needs and ease of implementation across all sites

“87% of our customers noted that having our allergen and nutrition information available would positively influence their decision to choose us compared to a nearby competitor.

“We are now fully legislation compliant. All allergen inspections have been passed without any issues and we can be assured that our customers with allergies are catered to.

“All recipes are now standardised across all sites, with dishes being presented in a uniform and brand complaint manner.

“As Nutritics can also provide micro-nutrition information, we can now also upsell dishes based on their nutritional content. For example, we highlight dishes “high in protein” for our gym-going customers. We can also design reduced calorie menus targeted at our more health conscious markets. This was a great benefit that was somewhat unexpected.

“Nutritics is a powerful tool in more ways than one if you have a creative team.”