Wyevale Garden Centres wins Design Effectiveness Awards for Food & Beverage concepts
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Wyevale Garden Centres has announced that its Food & Beverage (‘F&B’) concepts – Garden Kitchen Restaurant, Coffee Ground and Botanic Kitchen – have won Gold for the DBA's Design Effectiveness Awards, Travel & Leisure category.
Gold winners are recognised as having an “outstanding example of design effectiveness” and are awarded to projects “that have provided compelling and significant evidence of exceptional design effectiveness results”.
These awards, run by the industry’s prestigious Design Business Association, showcase the very best partnerships between businesses and agencies; the very best innovation and the very best application of design. The DBA's Design Effectiveness Awards rewarded Kiwi & Pom and WGC for their collaboration on creating an exceptional and fresh unified brand identity across WGC’s F&B concepts.
The competitive three-stage judging process involves the assessment of submissions across sixteen categories with 61 awards. The judges for the 2016 awards included Global Design Directors, Chief Marketing Officers, Heads of User Experience and Heads of Creative and Brand departments across leading and global brands such as Diageo, PepsiCo, United Biscuits, British Airways, Nestle, Waitrose and The Coca-Cola Company.
Wyevale Garden Centre’s hospitality investment, with over 40 refurbishments across the 153 centres and many more planned, has directly contributed to improved financial performance and an excellent customer experience. Before taking on Kiwi & Pom, design consultancy, WGC had a lack of co-ordination across its F&B offer. To address this issue WGC adopted a three-pronged development strategy: renovation (Garden Kitchen), innovation (Coffee Ground) and expansion (Botanic Kitchen).
The initial trial sites for Garden Kitchen and Coffee Ground were launched in 2014, whereas Botanic Kitchen’s trial site was launched at the beginning of 2015. The collaboration aimed to design three F&B concepts that compliment but are distinguishable from one another and that are strongly tied to WGC’s garden centre identity. The project improved counter layout, highlighted the theatre of food and coffee as well as rejuvenating the environment, which is directly helping profits at WGC grow. As a result of this project, colleague morale soared underpinned by an increase in both footfall and sales as well as a much improved customer experience.
Colin Hughes, Retail Operations Director at WGC, said: “We are delighted with this win! It is another illustration of WGC’s commitment to providing excellence in customer service and a unique shopping and dining experience across our garden centres. We are very proud of our colleagues and teams in Centres for their support of this transformation and pleased with the results of our collaboration with the leading design consultancy, Kiwi & Pom.”
Additionally, in 2015, Coffee Ground won the Menu Innovation and Development Awards (MIDAS) for the best New Restaurant Concept of the year as well as the Restaurant and Bar Design Awards. The HTA and Garden Trade News also recognised WGC’s Food & Beverage head office team as the ‘Greatest Garden Centre Team’ of 2015.
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