Market Place boss: ‘I want to be the fastest growing food hall in the country’

London-based food hall group Market Place is planning to double the size of its estate, starting with the launch of Market Place St Paul’s in early 2025.

Market Place launched in 2020 and now features nearly 60 traders across its sites in Peckham, Harrow, Vauxhall and Hounslow.

Managing director Blake Henderson told The Caterer the business started out in “underrated parts of London” but is now targeting growth in more central locations with high footfall.

Henderson is hoping to open three new sites across the capital in 2025, including one in a listed building, though he expects some delays in securing planning permission.

“We’re very young and driven and I want to be the fastest growing food hall in the country," said Henderson.

"[Food halls] are a very popular part of the industry and there are lots of undeveloped areas of London and the UK that don’t have this yet."

Henderson said he had visited “pretty much every large city in the country” with the aim of finding Market Place’s first regional site.

“I would love to be looking at international expansion in a few years’ time. In Vauxhall, we’re right next to the American embassy, and some Americans come in and say they’ve never seen anything like this before."

Henderson said he understood Market Place was in a competitive segment with rivals such as Market Halls and Kerb (and Kerb Events, where he was based previously), but believes the brand has an edge due to its high turnover of traders.

Market Place Vauxhall has also seen a 30% year-on-year sales increase and a 40% rise in bookings in the year-to-date.

“With somewhere like Vauxhall, in two years, I only have two traders left from the beginning. I want to make it as exciting as possible and every year we want to put new things in, just so it’s not the same thing every day,” he said.

However, he said he was reluctant to put a solely vegan trader into his venues due to diminishing demand from customers amid concerns that some plant-based products were also highly processed. 

“It’s probably a really unpopular opinion, but I feel like the veganism thing is disappearing because of the pushback on ultra-processed foods. If I had a sole vegan trader in, they wouldn’t compare to everybody else.

“In Vauxhall, the [most popular] trader is a steak trader, because clean meats seem to be selling more than anything else.”

Henderson has seen a rise in demand for corporate and events catering and the group received an enquiry for a wedding just last week.

Market Place has also recently partnered with former Top Gear presenter James May to become the first UK venue to serve his James Gin.

Henderson added: “We’ve noticed [more enquiries] in the last six months. We did a huge thing with Vauxhall council, who did a bunch of summer events. It’s starting to trickle in now and that was the goal. Let it come to us rather than us trying to go for it.

“We’re trying to think of new ways to get into the delivery part of it, because we’re getting a lot of demand. I definitely want to start looking at in a year or two.”

Market Place Hounslow is currently partially closed due to renovation works.