CODE meets Entegra Director of Business Development Jaclyn Evans

CODE caught up with Jaclyn Evans, the director of business development at Entegra, the UK’s largest hospitality procurement provider, and the biggest food group purchasing organisation in the world. Jaclyn talks about pricing, sourcing and negotiation on food and beverage, as well as supplier relationships, sustainability, provenance, distribution, and market intelligence. 

When Millie and I were first introduced to the concept on Entegra, it’s safe to say we had no idea what it was or that this type of business existed. I had spent the last 15 years running restaurants in London and the Middle East, then later as F&B Director for global hotel brands. Millie had been running London restaurants and later hotel F&B.

While the idea of outsourcing PR to an experienced, qualified and connected PR agency was entirely normal, the notion that you could outsource food and beverage purchasing, sourcing and negotiation to a global team was completely new to us. On closer inspection, it made complete sense.

For hospitality teams, the concept of ‘aces in places’ is ingrained in so much decision making, threaded through everything that happens. Is the chef skilled and creative? Are your leaders ambitious innovators? Are your GMs tenacious, do they have the ever-coveted hospitality gene?

When it comes to pricing, sourcing and negotiation, it is very often the executive chef taking the lead. On reflection, that person’s skill set is most likely going to be highly creative and very demanding. Coupled with the added pressures of playing a leading role in managing a business, leading teams, menu development along with so much more – it’s a full role. It’s also one suited to a particular personality type, and one that isn’t suited primarily to brokering pricing.

The finance director may also take a leading role, but in each scenario, not only are those people focused on running the business – they would be negotiation on their businesses managed spend and market insight alone. We wouldn’t go it alone when looking to renew our own mortgage, we would get a broker to do it. So when it comes to sourcing and negotiation on food and beverage as well as non-food items, particularly in this current market, outsourcing some or all categories to Entegra is the smarter choice.  

The concept works by pooling our total managed spend with all our clients to better negotiate. We may have a supplier relationship with a £20 million annual spend through 800 UK current clients. So when an independent business is negotiating with a £1 million spend, we can gain greater leverage than that of the independent. We have a team of qualified category buyers, so one person would be totally dedicated to spending 50 hours of their week focused on meat and poultry buying, sourcing and negotiation on behalf of our clients, for example. The rest of the team is made up of ex chefs and hospitality operators on the ground, each working directly with current clients on their own agendas and objectives.

Millie and I focus on finding and developing solutions for new restaurant businesses – none of which are exactly the same. The business is not just about better pricing, it’s about the right solutions for the specific business. We have sourced indigenous ingredients, found solutions for sustainability goals, found the right provenance story needed for a concept or worked on a distribution model on behalf of our clients. This doesn’t need to be on every food category, in some cases this work is done on select categories. There are many instances where there is a special relationship or provenance with a particular supplier which we would recommend keeping in place. In this case we might look at the dry and frozen category. If we have a direct manufacturer deal or can source sugar, milk and mayonnaise on a better deal to protect your bottom line, it’s a great solution.

Market intelligence has also played a big role in insights we have delivered into clients. Knowing that there is an avian flu to alert our clients, an algae surge in Chile affecting global salmon pricing or the effect of Ukraine having been 10 per cent of the world’s cooking oil supply has given our clients foresight on what to expect, guiding potential decisions on change. Our cost is paid for through our supply partners on our managed spend, so unlike the PR agency example, we are not a direct cost to our hospitality clients.

Finding solutions and pricing and the success of that has been reliant on receiving the correct data and forecasts as well as key objectives from businesses from the outset. Thereafter, we do the legwork to find and present the right solutions for the business on the categories they want to investigate, which they either agree with or tweak. In this ever-changing climate, and with so many restaurants focused on the impact of increasing costs we can bridge some of the gap in change. Many restaurants are looking to us to find some of the solutions and answers, it seems there has never been a better time.

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