Tender opportunity: Design Museum, Kensington

The Design Museum is located in Kensington, west London and is the world’s leading design museum

It makes the impact of design visible and is the only place in the UK where the design industry, education and the public can come together to change the way people think about themselves and the future. Recent exhibitions, covering the breadth of design, include Objects of Desire: Surrealism and Design, Sneakers Unboxed: Studio to Street; Waste Age: What can design do? Electronic: From Kraftwerk to The Chemical Brothers’ and currently, Ai Weiwei: Making Sense   The Design Museum wish to appoint a caterer to operate a new Members Room food and beverage offer and the existing Ground Floor visitor café. There is also the opportunity to tender for the museum’s in-house catering services for internal functions and some corporate events.

We are inviting expressions of interest from ambitious and creative companies who can provide a food and drink offer of the highest quality. It is essential that the selected caterer is creative, innovative, socially aware and an upholder of ethical business practices with a genuine commitment to taking an interest in the Design Museum in all its public and commercial forms.

The Design Museum welcomes around 600,000 visitors annually. Café customers include museum visitors, as well as local residents, families, and evening visitors as part of corporate hire and public programme events. With our strong member community of more than 3,300, we have the potential to make our new Members Room a destination venue.

This is a great opportunity for a single provider who has experience in operating a café and catering within a museum setting, with a proven track record for producing a distinctive catering offer of outstanding quality within a beautiful and unique venue at the heart of prosperous west London.

The three-year contract (with opportunity for extension) will be tendered in May and awarded early July, ready to commence operation in September 2023. We shall be holding a pre-tender open day on 4 May 2023 for prospective companies to discuss the opportunity, assess the scope of work and visit the catering spaces.

To submit your expression of interest and confirm your open day attendance, please send a brief overview of your company to: tori.reeve@designmuseum.org by 27 April 2023.