CHAIN WATCH Fish'n'Chick'n

At your leisure

Eating facilities at caravan parks have certainly come a long way since I was younger. Back then it was either a do-it-yourself dinner using the limited facilities in your holiday home or a seat in a ‘cram in as many as you can’ canteen-style environment. Nowadays, there are sports bars with satellite TV, pizzerias offering a delivery service and coffee shops selling everything from an espresso to a macchiato, all located within a food court not too dissimilar to those you would find in out-of-town shopping malls.
To bring its facilities up-to-date with these new expectations, holiday company Haven, part of the Bourne Leisure Group, has invested nearly £1 million on developing the central food complex area at its Thorpe Park caravan site in Cleethorpes, North East Lincolnshire. New for 2011 is fast food giant Burger King and, as of last month, its first branded fish and chip offering in the form of Fish’n’Chick’n. So how did this fledging brand come to be part of one of the UK’s most popular holiday resorts?
“Bourne Leisure felt they could improve their fish and chip offering,” says James Lipscombe, director of Fish‘n’Chick’n. “They had seen what we were doing and they really liked the quality of our products, the nature of our branding and the professionalism of the business. From our perspective we were thinking about franchising our brand for a while, and we felt that working with such a large corporate business with extensive experience of operating alongside franchise brands could only be a positive move for us.”
The 750sqft store is situated directly next to Burger King and just a few units away from Papa John’s Pronto, while adjacent to the new chippy is Haven’s own Aqua Bar – a relaxed family eatery – and Seymours Bar, its over-16’s offering. Fighting for market share among these different outlets isn’t something James is going to lose sleep over.
“I have full belief in the quality of the products and our staff training to ensure continuity of product. Bourne Leisure, like us, felt there was a real opportunity to be had by offering spectacular fish and chips on its holiday camps.”
What followed was a very steep learning curve for Fish‘n’Chick’n, which until now hadn’t ventured down the franchise route. “We had to put together a host of documents including an operating manual, a training manual specifically written for a franchise model and all the brand audits.
“It was actually incredibly beneficial to our business in terms of producing much clearer and more concise quality systems and controls throughout all our stores. I genuinely believe that the systems and controls we now have in place both in our franchise and existing stores are truly groundbreaking and allow us to scale up our business model with relative ease,” remarks James.
In working with Bourne Leisure, Fish‘n’Chick’n had the problem of geography to overcome; the new franchise site is approximately 100 miles from its nearest store in the south, whilst a second franchised store on Haven’s Primrose Valley site in Filey, Yorkshire, is over 200 miles away.
“It’s not easy working with that distance between your core grouping of shops, but we learnt how to import the systems and controls and the communications that are needed to run a store that is a long way from our initial base.”
Under the franchise agreement, Fish‘n’Chick’n has trained up ten members of staff who work solely within the takeaway and who are tasked with ensuring the brand standards are met. “We carried out a comprehensive four week training programme, which covered all the major aspects of running the business,” explains James. “The staff then spent two weeks with us working in our stores, before we came here for two weeks to work onsite alongside them. We then stayed an additional two weeks just to ensure the brand standards were being met and that the staff really understood the training we had given them.”
To all intents and purposes, operating the site here at Haven isn’t all too different to the way Fish‘n’Chick’n’ runs its other 35 stores. The staff have all been trained in the same way, the size of the operation is something the group is used to, the branding and uniforms are the same and even the purchasing is done through the group’s head office. So there should be no reason why the offering is any different from any of its other stores.
But there is one area that is poles apart from what Fish‘n’Chick’n is used to and that’s the huge variation in footfall. With the seasonal nature of holiday parks, footfall here can increase by over 150% during the busy summer period and this has brought with it its own challenges, for example stock holding.
“We’ve managed to get over that quite easily as we’ve developed a simple traffic light system where red indicates a quiet week, amber is an average one and green is when the shop is at its busiest. In these different periods we have introduced a minimum stock holding, or MSH as we call it. There should never be a reason for the shop to drop below this and it is all covered in the franchisees training. By doing this we’ve managed to ensure the shop holds enough stock to service its customers efficiently.”
On the menu is Fish‘n’Chick’n’s normal fare of sustainably sourced Icelandic cod, chips, sausages, chicken, pies and the such, and it’s no surprise that fish and chips makes up the bulk of the sales at about 60%. However, chicken is also proving a good seller, which James puts down to the unique way in which it is prepared.  “We only ever use fresh chickens. These chickens are prepared and cooked exactly the same as in our own stores. Our whole chickens are cooked on chicken spits and our Southern Fried Chicken is cooked in Henny Penny pressure fryers to ensure the chicken retains its moisture.”
As a result of the dramatic changes in footfall, Fish’n’Chick’n has omitted certain products from the offering, for example pork loin ribs as it was decided during off-peak times the takeaway simply would not sell enough. However, it has introduced almost every meal deal you can think of to appeal to the family market, from a fish supper to sausage to southern fried chicken.
The majority of the brands that the takeaway here utilises are the same as those used across the other Fish‘n’Chick’n shops. It hasn’t been tempted to deviate from its normal batter mix for example, which is Middletons Gold (www.middletonfoods.com), despite the fact there are well-known regional variations. “We use exactly the same colour batter as we do in all of our stores as we genuinely believe it is the best,” says James.  
And as with all the new shops that come onboard, this one boasts a new three pan, high efficiency, Martyn Edwards Frank Ford (www.me-ff.com) range. “It’s a good, robust, reliable, British range,” adds James.
Interestingly enough at this franchised site, Fish‘n’Chick’n has moved away from peeling and chipping its potatoes on site in favour of freshly prepared chips from Triple F (www.fyldefreshandfabulous.com). “We wanted to ensure the quality of the product was being maintained and we wanted to take the skill out of the process so that it was easier for the staff to meet our exacting brand standards.” explains James.
With the site now open, Fish‘n’Chick’n is looking forward to a busy summer ahead, not just here, but in general as it continues to work on the brand to ensure it is in the best possible shape to franchise out to the wider fish and chip shop market.
“In terms of a franchise brand, we are working with Bourne Leisure to ensure we have a business model exactly right before we roll it out. Their experience in franchising has been invaluable to our business. We must ensure that potential franchisees are well looked after and are making a healthy return on their investment,” concludes James.