Ingredients of Success: Profitable Cafés in Museums recording

May 25, 2023

Watch the recording of our session on Ingredients of Success: Profitable Cafés in Museums: https://youtu.be/dF1-1bvIglM 

Trainer: Paul Cottrell from Turpin Smale

Setting up a café or catering offer is increasingly important for museums wishing to offer a memorable visitor experience. Your aims may differ, but a café can be seen as one of the first steps towards financial sustainability or linked to your community engagement goals. This half day session will take you through the essential ingredients of a successful catering offer, led by Paul Cottrell from Turpin Smale. The session will also include a series of case studies from around the region illustrating how museums have successfully developed their catering offer.

Session outline

Paul will be looking at how you can simplify the process of running a successful café and ensure you concentrate on what is important. This includes managing your people effectively, good planning, controlling your costs and checking if your café is fit for purpose. A good café should reflect you and your team’s creativity and flair; whether you aim to make it a community hub or generate some income. On the day we will include live case studies from around the regions looking at how museums have been able to adopt novel and successful solutions to catering. This session will make a complex and sometimes challenging enterprise a little bit simpler.

The learning outcomes from the session:

• Understand the need to agree your rationale for your cafe offer
• Gain an understanding of people management within the catering context
• Able to set measurable objectives when developing a catering offer
• Understand how to control costs
• Identify which types of service and business models may work for you (assisted service/table service/food to go/seating etc

About the trainer

Paul Cottrell, has extensive knowledge of hospitality catering and visitor attractions. Working for a range of organisations including Chatsworth House & Waddesdon Manor. As a consultant, Paul has worked on feasibility studies, budget planning, hands-on training and mentoring colleagues in the sector.

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