Creed Foodservice has launched a café innovation space at its High Wycombe location as part of its expansion into the OOH leisure market, with the space designed to emulate the customer experience for café and leisure brands.
Completely adaptable, ‘The Hub’ can be utilised by any of Creed’s 3,5000 customers and has been created to allow businesses of all sizes to simulate and scrutinise their offering. It will allow Creed to capitalise the OOH leisure sector, which has forecasted growth of £91.9bn by the end of 2022, with The National Trust having already had access to the space for a product development day.
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Ben Thomas, senior product development manager at The National Trust comments: “For our most recent insights day with Creed we were invited to The Hub, which was dressed to mimic a coffee shop environment, to test a range of new products that might be suitable for our operations and customer base. The Hub is a great informal, relaxed meeting environment that enables you to visualise the customer journey within a café or coffee shop setting. We will definitely be utilising the space again in the future for NPD sessions with Creed.”
Anna Clapson, insights manager at Creed adds: “At Creed we really do believe that the best way to evolve, develop and improve your offering is to experience how it could feel for yourself. It’s for this reason that we created The Hub. From being able to mimic the warmth and convivial feeling you get from a café space, to having menu boards and POS in the right places and displays of food and drink laid out to trial, our customers really can live the experience that they are trying to create themselves.”
As well as offering a place to imitate the customer journey, The Hub is also a space being used for insights sessions, where concepts such as sustainability, technology and promotions are explored. Going forward Creed will be hosting sector-specific events and supplier days themed around particular products and services too.
