Tender for Riverside Venue Catering Opportunity

Description

Open Newtown is a community owned development trust working to help make Newtown a viable and vibrant place to live, work and visit. The Riverside Venue will act as a gateway to Newtown’s green spaces, providing a warm ‘Welsh’ welcome to locals and visitors. It will create a new visitor experience for Newtown by offering tourist information, a small retail area, exhibition spaces, café, fully accessible toilets, and an adult changing space. The first floor will provide a flexible multi-room space, offering opportunities for conferences, flexible meeting space, events, training & workshops and exhibitions. Café / Catering Opportunities An opportunity exists for a business relationship to be developed around the catering offering that can help meet our aims, ethos, and vision, whilst offering the operator or franchisee a fruitful business. This relationship could emerge from an existing business, an individual with the required drive and ambition, or for a local organisation. The current capital investment at the Riverside Venue includes, but not exclusively, the provision of a new cafe operation as part of the visitor experience. Open Newtown and its partners have funded the bulk of the equipment, utensils, crockery and cutlery needed to run a successful operation. We are now seeking those that could help deliver our vision around the food offering provided by the building. Open Newtown has a strong set of principles around our environment, the climate agenda, biodiversity, wellbeing, Welsh language & culture with an emphasis on our local economy. We will expect these to be reflected on any tenders received. What we are looking for: We are seeking an operator / franchisee that can deliver a professional catering operation. They must be experienced in the demands of running a busy café/restaurant operation. The operator will provide a quality, all year round, attractive, catering operation, with friendly, fast, and efficient customer service. The operator / franchisee will need to meet the catering expectations and requirements of Open Newtown’s varied visitor groups and to provide a top quality, enjoyable catering experience, which will add to their overall visitor experience at the centre. They will need to work closely with Open Newtown and other potential users of the venue to ensure the provision of catering meets the needs of the building. The initial occupational agreement will run for 3 years, with built in review periods and, if the relationship proves successful, there will be opportunities for extensions. We are looking for an operator / franchisee that would be willing to cater for events as they arise. There is potential to offer ‘off-site’ catering, utilising the buildings facilities to provide an out-of-hours catering service if of interest. The frequency and nature of events will naturally vary and is likely to increase in number over the coming years. We wish to explore the best arrangements for how an operator / franchise fee might be determined. We would like your submission to include details on how you would prefer to make the financial arrangements work, and if successful in the first rounds of sifting, we will engage in further dialogue. Our preferred option would be to agree on a flat rate ‘fee’ payment (per month or per quarter) but we would be happy to consider options such as: • A percentage rate based on turnover • A combination of the above. • Or others that you might wish to detail. We offer: Equipment, an iconic space to trade from, support and the potential to expand the operation to other nearby venues. A cost for utilities will be apportioned based on consumption (electricity & water, phone, internet). We are still investigating the rates of the building and we would need further discussions over any licences directly applicable to the café element, as they may come under the remit of the overall building. The café is situated inside the Riverside Venue and cannot operate as