Honest Burgers reopens selected regional sites today for delivery

Honest Burgers has said it will reopen selected regional sites for delivery services from today, in addition to its 14 London sites which opened last week.

Speaking to The Caterer, commercial director Meg Ellis said that following a “really careful process”, the company would be reopening a number of sites across the UK, including Manchester, Cardiff, Brighton and Bristol, to operate a delivery-only service via Deliveroo.

“We looked at our estate and at where largest demand would be for delivery, which buildings would be most conducive, and put together a voluntary workforce,” she said.

Ellis said the company was bringing back in a selection of staff, including chefs and general managers, on a non-compulsory basis, to lead the company’s operations whilst ensuring that they had “extremely stringent health and safety systems” in place.

In order to comply with and exceed government health and safety guidelines, measures for selecting a tailored workforce had included surveying staff about how many others they share their accommodation with and details around recent foreign travel, saying they had gone “ beyond the individual” by conducting health checks, including ongoing temperature checks.

“We’ve capped our business to what we can safely do. We could sell a lot more burgers but not at the risk of our customers’, our people’s and drivers’ health,” Ellis said.

Ellis said that delivery operations from their London sites over the Bank Holiday weekend had been “wonderfully busy” with customers providing "generous" and positive feedback on their Spring menu.

She said that the company was working on a staged reopening plan and was currently unpicking the government’s new guidelines and trying to determine whether July would be “a reality” for a business of their “shape and size”.

“Having a collective point of view as a collective leadership has allowed us to pivot much faster than we otherwise would have.”

During the lockdown Honest Burgers, founded by Philip Eeles and Tom Barton in 2011 launched its hugely popular burger-making kits as part of a charity fundraiser for Trussell Trust food banks, Hospitality Action and the Landworkers' Alliance.