SOCIAL Entrepreneur Josh Littlejohn’s sandwich chain business, Social Bite, has grown its corporate catering division to £70,000 per month from just £7,000 in 2014.
Corporate Catering now accounts for 50 per cent of all revenue at business.
“The exponential increase we have seen in corporate catering is incredibly encouraging for us as a social enterprise,” said director Alan Mahon. “The more profit we make, the more we can contribute to the heart of our cause, which is to donate 100 per cent of our profits to homeless initiatives in the community.”
The firm has also seen a 25 per cent increase in average order value over a six-month period. Operating out of Livingston, most of its catering business is carried out in the central belt, to companies including PwC, Pinsent Masons, Burness Paull, JP Morgan and Deloitte, but it delivers as far north as Aberdeen, where it counts Wood Group as a client.
The business earlier this month received a £550,000 lottery grant for its Social Bite Academy, which offers a paid four-year course to homeless people that provides support and paid employment in Social Bite or a commercial partner.
Social Bite has been supported since its inception by entrepreneur and philanthropist Sir Tom Hunter.
“Josh is a remarkable young man, so there’s some really good things happening there, including Brewgooder, where we teamed up with Brewdog to produce a craft lager,” said Sir Tom.
The Brewgooder offshoot gives 100 per cent of its profits to providing clean water to developing countries.
The success of Social Bite’s catering operations has been helped by a move in 2015 from paper and pen spreadsheets to a cloud-based software service from technology firm Spoonfed.
Spoonfed was set up by Willie Biggart and Murray McNicol, who previously owned a catering business. The system is used for online ordering, production planning, route planning, invoicing and email marketing.
Mr Biggart said: “Social Bite does brilliant work within the homeless community and we wanted to ensure that they could continue to do this with the help of Spoonfed. As a result, we incorporated the option to ‘suspend’ items like coffee or sandwiches, meaning companies placing corporate orders could reserve items to give back to the homeless community, all with just a couple of clicks.”
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