How To Rebuild The Hospitality Industry

How can the hospitality industry survive and re-build?

Joanne Barratt, managing director, The Venues Collection discusses how the hospitality industry has struggled in the pandemic and what the industry can do to help it re-build again.

Hospitality and events are often cited to be two separate industries, but they are intrinsically linked. Without hospitality, your event venue won’t be able to welcome your delegates, serve them lunch, or accommodate them overnight. The hospitality industry is currently on its knees and what’s happening will have a huge impact on events.

Hospitality

The combination of Brexit and Covid-19 is having a detrimental effect on the appeal of working in hospitality, from the chefs creating our menus to the pickers and packers of food, the housekeeping staff to F&B managers. Many hospitality workers were originally from the EU, and the impact of Brexit has meant that an estimated 92,000 EU nationals* have decided to leave the UK and head home because it is now harder to work here. Couple that with a pandemic that shut down an entire industry, and forced the people working in hospitality to find other work and we have an industry that has been decimated.

Hospitality has the reputation of being hard work coupled with long and unsociable hours. The lockdowns forced many of our colleagues to find work outside of the industry and some prefer this alternative. Covid-19 has enabled people to revaluate their lives, and many have realised that long hours and hard work isn’t what they want, despite the benefits the industry brings.

Customers are also more demanding than they were before and are returning to restaurants and hotels in full force. People want to eat out, to meet up and to stay over. But their high demands are having a negative impact on the small teams just trying to get by.

There is also a nervousness in the industry, will we have to go through another full lockdown? How would we survive if we did? Events are coming back, but there is still an air of caution amongst bookers and a need for the highest levels of flexibility.

As we come back to pre-Covid levels of business, the industry doesn’t have the staff that we used to have. The events industry is working hard, and predictions show that events will be back to normal in 2022. But that will not happen if the venues and hotels are not able to cope with the demand.

Demand, survive and re-build

The first thing we need to do is look after our own teams. Short-staffed teams can only do so much, they need support from the top to ensure that they don’t burn out. We need to look at the problem and come up with creative solutions. For example, we recently received an application from a chef, but she was a single parent who could only work during school hours. Before Covid-19 we would have wanted her to work in the evenings or to cover breakfasts, but we decided to look at the problem differently. So much of our business is conferences and training events and so we do need daytime chefs, so we have taken her on to only cover these daytime needs and to relieve the pressure from our full-time chefs who can then focus on the mornings and evenings.

The events industry may need to get used to some venues and restaurants being closed some of the time which means that availability may become an issue. Some restaurants have recently had to close due to a lack of staff; this is impacting every restaurant, hotel, and venue of every location and of every size.

We need everyone using venues and hotels to have patience, to be understanding, and to be accommodating to the exacting times the industry is dealing with.

We also need to grow our own. We are part of Compass Group UK & Ireland and as such we have an array of training, apprenticeship and development opportunities to help our staff to develop and grow, or even change paths entirely.

The third thing we as an industry need to do is to go back to grassroots and ensure that school leavers and graduates know that working in hospitality offers a viable, stable and rewarding career path. We need to share the success stories, get involved with developing the courses and encourage more people into our vibrant and rewarding industry.

In 12 months’ time, we will be back to normal and the hospitality teams that have worked through this will find themselves in an enviable and unique position. They will have unprecedented experienced and they will have survived the toughest period ever know to our industry. Their skillset will be exceptional; they will be more agile, creative and knowledgeable. They will be much better equipped for the future and will have learnt more in 18 months than many do in a lifetime.

There are a number of industry initiatives being led by key associations and companies to help hospitality to recover; I urge you all to get behind them to ensure that our industry not only survives but thrives over the next 12 months and beyond.

The original version of this article was first published in Conference News 

We are a hospitality and catering recruitment company. We can support you to find a new role or the staff you need to grow your business.

Sustainability in Hospitality

Compass Future of Food event: sustainability in hospitality makes business sense

At an event held in London this week, Compass gathered together partners and sustainability in hospitality experts to discuss the climate crisis and how, by working together, food businesses can reduce their carbon emissions and help the planet.

Sustainability in hospitality is a hot topic for all businesses around the globe, but with the food system responsible for 13 billion tonnes of carbon-equivalent emissions annually, foodservice giant Compass hosted a ‘Future of Food’ event in London to discuss how the industry can work together to tackle the climate crisis.

The sustainability in hospitality event bought together industry leaders to stimulate debate around the complex journey towards achieving net zero. What was quickly made clear was that businesses have a responsibility to make big changes to address the climate crisis, but these changes also make business sense. Clients and end-consumers are crying out for ways to become more sustainable and want to spend their money with companies that reflect their desires to improve their diet, in terms of both their health and the planet.

Dominic Blakemore, group chief executive of Compass Group, said it was fascinating to see the UK leading the way in terms of addressing the climate crisis, but he is seeing acceleration in the debate all over the globe.

He described a conversation he’d had with the chief executive of a Brazilian healthcare group: “I said to him, ‘what do we need to do to win more business?’ to which he replied we need to do more on the sustainability agenda.”

Blakemore said inclusion, decarbonisation and the use of digital are being discussed in all conversations with Compass clients. “So as a business, we need to have a strong view in terms of leadership,” he said. “If we can pull together and collaborate, it will have a truly meaningful impact.”

Businesses can make a difference

Diane Holdorf, managing director of food and nature of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, said sustainability was a “hugely important business issue”.

“We have to work on this for the security of business, but it gives business an opportunity too. We can play a big role in addressing climate challenges.”

“If we can’t take on this challenge head on and act on it, who can? The race to zero is on – and the key word is race: how can we get there quickly?”

Speaking on a panel during the event, Emma Keller, head of sustainability at Nestlé UK & Ireland, described how when she switched jobs from WWF to Nestlé, many people thought she had “moved over to the dark side”, but she said she took on the role because she felt businesses are a “force for good” when it comes to sustainability.

“If we can’t take on this challenge head on and act on it, who can? The race to zero is on – and the key word is race: how can we get there quickly?”

Many organisations, including the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, the University of Oxford and the UK’s Net Zero Business Champion Andrew Griffith MP, praised Compass for its ambitions to become net zero by 2030, an initiative it announced back in May. The commitments saw the foodservice group also announce the launch of a £1m seed investment fund towards sustainable food production innovation and its plans to convert around 40% of its meat-based meals to plant-based alternatives by 2030.

But the speakers at the conference were clear in saying sustainable change cannot be done in silo. “This is a team game and not something anyone can do by themselves,” said Robin Mills, managing director, Compass Group UK and Ireland. “We’re too reliant on each other to set out on our own path.”

Carolyn Ball, director for the delivery of net zero at Compass Group UK and Ireland who took up the position to help the business meet its commitments, added: “It will be a hollow victory if we get [to net zero by 2030] without enlisting the wider support for real, radical, transformative change… It’s a commercial imperative as much as an environmental one.”

Education is key

One of the messages from the conference, which was held in the Queen Elizabeth II conference centre in Westminster on Tuesday afternoon, was that education is key way to address the climate crisis.

Ryan Holmes, culinary director B&I for Compass UK and Ireland, said it’s not just about educating Compass clients, but also the end consumer and chefs internally. He described how, in order to encourage people to eat more sustainably, he and his team use a “nudging technique”, because “no one likes to be dictated to”.

He said he doesn’t label any of his dishes vegan or vegetarian, and meat-based meals are placed towards the back in workplace canteens, which encourages people to make better choices.

Holme’s subtle approach includes making a hero out of vegetables on menus and using labels such as “great British produce”, as well as reducing the amount of meat in a dish, rather than removing the option entirely.

“At one of our manufacturing contracts, our plant-based dishes and healthier choices have become the most popular,” he said. “It’s important that anything plant-based is there with purpose, not to tick a box. They need to contain the right amount of protein and fibre and at least two of your five a day. It’s not about a cheesy pasta anymore, it’s about really good dishes.”

Tackling food waste is also incredibly important to help businesses and consumers alike hit their carbon-neutral goals.

Nicola Weir, director of WorldClimate at Deloitte said: “65 billion litres of water are use on potatoes that we throw in the bin – the numbers are just frightening. We’ve got to all force this change in the system and educate people and change the process.”

Meanwhile, Keller’s key takeaway was to waste less. “Don’t waste food, energy or time. We know enough; we have more data that we’ve ever had. Let’s crack on.”

The original version of this article was first published in The Caterer

We are a hospitality and catering recruitment company. We can support you to find a new role or the staff you need to grow your business.