Our Story: The Good Food Experts

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We are the good Food Experts, and our foodservice roots trace all the way back to a butcher’s shop in Dublin city centre in 1966. That’s where our founder, Noel Keating, learned the craft and artistry of butchery. From our humble beginnings as a family-owned butcher shop in the heart of Dublin city 50 years ago to our global scale today, our mission is to continue producing the highest quality, fully traceable food for our customers. We started with just one, and today we employ over 5,000 people and operate 14 manufacturing facilities, supplying leading foodservice brands across Ireland, the UK, Europe and the USA.

WHAT DO WE DO?

Our division, Kepak Foodservice in creating innovative, on-trend, and delicious food that’s operationally suited to specific business sectors. We offer full business and marketing support services to our loyal foodservice customers, using our scale and experience in the last 40 years in the foodservice to benefit our loyal customers.

Our innovative product ranges include premium quality beef burgers, chicken products, added value red meat, meal solutions, and a range of quality bread products.

CUSTOMER-CENTRIC

What excites us at Kepak Foodservice are our customers. Our customers never cease to impress us with their motivation and dedication, and we’re proud to say we work with the best brands in the business. They span multiple sectors, ideal for quick-service restaurants, food-to-go operators, pubs, hotels, travel, leisure, and educational facilities among others.

Under our ethos ‘More than Meat’, We offer full business support and advice, empowering them to run best in class food businesses. For us, it’s all about partnership with our customers and we believe that in working together we can all succeed commercially. We believe this so much, that we even built our (Award-winning) loyalty programme called Food Alliance.

The Food Alliance Loyalty Programme

We created Food Alliance as our purpose-built loyalty programme for foodservice operators, and our vision for the programme is a BIG one! The programme was launched in close partnership with our key distributors in Ireland as a way of thanking our loyal customers in a meaningful way for their repeat business.

Food Alliance to not only to reward our customers with personal rewards for repeat business but to also support the incredible businesses they have built. Our customers are our key focus and motivator here at Kepak Foodservice, and we use the Food Alliance programme to empower members through a broad range of relevant business rewards and services designed to help them get ahead.  Food Alliance is super easy to use and free to join for foodservice operators in Ireland who buy our products from participating distributors.

Through this programme we also offer Point of Sale, brand new monthly offers, the opportunity to use your points to donate to our nominated charity The Simon Communities of Ireland. You can even enter our monthly Play competitions for amazing prizes such as Holidays, concert tickets, free Marketing Services for 6 months, and many more!

FOOD ALLIANCE HELPING YOU GET ONLINE

We consistently check in with our customers. Listening to their feedback, using our scale and experience as well as ongoing research and insight mining, we provide ongoing Advice & Trends and keep our programme updated with any supports we think might help. In response to the COVID19 pandemic and ensuing lockdown across Ireland, we launched our Online Ordering Packages and Managed Marketing Services to our members. We knew the challenge our customers were facing in pivoting their businesses to keep their doors open, and operating on the front line. So Helping our customers get online quickly and providing experienced streamlined help through our partnership with Flipdish was our quick-fire response to help where we could. Read more about that partnership here.

OUR RESPONSE TO COVID19

COOVID19 hit Ireland in the form of a lockdown and restricted movement of max 2 kilometers in March 2020 had a serious impact on our society, psychology and economy. While our quick service takeaway business took off, the rest of our customers were forced to close or pivot their businesses to collections or delivery only. Our response as a business was to gather our top experts, chefs, consultants and business planners to create the Covid19 content series of advice, insight, and assurance for the new business formats which we released weekly. We rehauled our Food Alliance rewards to create the Food Alliance Business Builders, including more business supports than ever, and turned around our With You All The Way campaign in weeks.

With You All The Way campaign was born out of the uncertainty created by Covid 19, where many of our customers were going online for the first time or were in need of guidance and insight on how to do this best. Which is why we have three campaign pillars, Maximise Your Menu (all around making your menu work harder for your business), Delivery Done Well (Is your product arriving the way you want it to for your end customers?), and Menu Solutions (With fewer people in the back of house, and operations under considerable pressure here are some core flexible products that can be used across hundreds of delicious recipes along with some tasty inspiration to ease back of house operations). We want our customers to know that we are With You all the Way through this difficult and uncertain time.

AWARD-WINNING FOOD SERVICE SOLUTIONS & ACCREDITATIONS

While our core focus is always on our customers, we have been lucky to collect some accreditations and awards through the years. Our award-winning teams have been acknowledged for everything from the BRC and Quality certifications to the BFFF people awards and Allied Irish Marketing awards for 2020. You can check out the rest of our awards in full here.

SUSTAINABILITY

At Kepak, we have created a blueprint for the future to safeguard these precious reserves. We call it Kepak CORE.

KEPAK CORE is our blueprint for achieving growth in a sustainable way. We pledge to accomplish this by putting our Customers first, through continual Optimisation of our entire supply chain, by acting Responsibly towards our staff, farmers, suppliers, and community, and by taking due care of our Environment.

Origin Green is a key way that we prioritize our sustainability initiative as a group. We’re very proud to be the founding members of Origin Green, the national sustainability programme for the food and drink industry, uniting government, the private sector, and food producers. Kepak is a founding and proactive member and it’s embedded as one of our core values as a business. You can read more about our sustainability here.

 

Let’s stay in touch…

Have a question, or want to learn more? We always want to hear from our customers, all the details are on the Contact page here. Let’s keep in touch, why not sign up to our Newsletter to become a Kepak Insider? We promise, we only send out the good stuff. Helpful updates and relevant advice for anyone in the foodservice business.

READ THE FULL KEPAK STORY 

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