Cook dazzled the judges to carry off the Independent Retail Chain of the Year award. Julian Hunt reports
Seven years after it was founded by Edward Perry and Dale Penfold with a £12,000 loan that allowed them to open a tiny 250 sq ft store in Farnham, deli-style frozen food retailer Cook has won the ultimate accolade - being crowned Independent Retail Chain of the Year in The Grocer Gold Awards.
Cook’s business model is unique: it makes and sells premium meals, puddings and cakes that are intended to look and taste as good as home-made food. A state-of-the-art kitchen in Sittingbourne supplies its stores with 70% of the products they sell - with everything frozen sold under the Cook brand.
And it’s the concept that impressed our judges the most. “Cook is trying to reinvent and reposition frozen food by retailing home-made, convenient products,” they said. “It is an exciting and genuinely different proposition. Everything we think they should be doing - they are doing.”
As well as having a great retail idea, Cook’s slick marketing - based on a clear understanding of the sorts of customers it should be targeting - helped it beat off competition from some equally excellent and more well-established chains to win the award. It has taken time to fine-tune the Cook offer - everything from the menu offer to the shop design has been tweaked and tested since 1998. And the chain’s uncompromising approach to quality has also stymied rapid expansion - mainly because in the early days food was being produced in a development kitchen in Gillingham.
“Growth will be dictated by our kitchens. Selling our food is reasonably easy - making it is difficult,” Perry told us recently. But with the opening of its Sittingbourne facility, the company now has the capacity to step up its expansion plans - and hopes, one day, to have 300 stores around the country.
Frozen pie in the sky? Well, The Grocer has been tracking Cook’s development since 2001, when it had just a handful of stores. Last year, we featured it as one of our Ones to Watch and this year, on the back of some impressive growth, the retailer entered the Bubbling Under section of our Top 50 ranking.
The company’s ambition is impressive: it expects to have 17 stores by the end of this month and has a medium-term plan to have up to 40 by March 2008.
Turnover, meanwhile, has grown from £150,000 in Cook’s first year of trading to £6.4m in 2004/2005, when it also moved into cash profitability for the first time.
It is expecting turnover to hit £10m in the current financial year.
Clearly, people will be a critical component in its growth plans, but our judges liked the fact that Cook is clearly a very people-centred business. For starters, it has a rigorous training programme in place. It also has a scheme called Connect to forge close links between store staff and those working in the kitchens - which it says is a core feature of the company’s culture.
Customer interaction with staff is encouraged in Cook stores, where there is always plenty of sampling and people on hand to advise on menu planning.
Cook may not be the biggest independent retail chain in the business - but this year it has been judged the best.
Seven years after it was founded by Edward Perry and Dale Penfold with a £12,000 loan that allowed them to open a tiny 250 sq ft store in Farnham, deli-style frozen food retailer Cook has won the ultimate accolade - being crowned Independent Retail Chain of the Year in The Grocer Gold Awards.
Cook’s business model is unique: it makes and sells premium meals, puddings and cakes that are intended to look and taste as good as home-made food. A state-of-the-art kitchen in Sittingbourne supplies its stores with 70% of the products they sell - with everything frozen sold under the Cook brand.
And it’s the concept that impressed our judges the most. “Cook is trying to reinvent and reposition frozen food by retailing home-made, convenient products,” they said. “It is an exciting and genuinely different proposition. Everything we think they should be doing - they are doing.”
As well as having a great retail idea, Cook’s slick marketing - based on a clear understanding of the sorts of customers it should be targeting - helped it beat off competition from some equally excellent and more well-established chains to win the award. It has taken time to fine-tune the Cook offer - everything from the menu offer to the shop design has been tweaked and tested since 1998. And the chain’s uncompromising approach to quality has also stymied rapid expansion - mainly because in the early days food was being produced in a development kitchen in Gillingham.
“Growth will be dictated by our kitchens. Selling our food is reasonably easy - making it is difficult,” Perry told us recently. But with the opening of its Sittingbourne facility, the company now has the capacity to step up its expansion plans - and hopes, one day, to have 300 stores around the country.
Frozen pie in the sky? Well, The Grocer has been tracking Cook’s development since 2001, when it had just a handful of stores. Last year, we featured it as one of our Ones to Watch and this year, on the back of some impressive growth, the retailer entered the Bubbling Under section of our Top 50 ranking.
The company’s ambition is impressive: it expects to have 17 stores by the end of this month and has a medium-term plan to have up to 40 by March 2008.
Turnover, meanwhile, has grown from £150,000 in Cook’s first year of trading to £6.4m in 2004/2005, when it also moved into cash profitability for the first time.
It is expecting turnover to hit £10m in the current financial year.
Clearly, people will be a critical component in its growth plans, but our judges liked the fact that Cook is clearly a very people-centred business. For starters, it has a rigorous training programme in place. It also has a scheme called Connect to forge close links between store staff and those working in the kitchens - which it says is a core feature of the company’s culture.
Customer interaction with staff is encouraged in Cook stores, where there is always plenty of sampling and people on hand to advise on menu planning.
Cook may not be the biggest independent retail chain in the business - but this year it has been judged the best.
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