Setting up a café or catering offer is increasingly important for museums wishing to offer a memorable visitor experience. Your aims may differ, but a café can be seen as one of the first steps towards financial sustainability or linked to your community engagement goals.

This half day session will take you through the essential ingredients of a successful catering offer, led by Paul Cottrell from Turpin Smale.

The session will also include a series of case studies from around the region illustrating how museums have successfully developed their catering offer.

Who will be delivering the training?

Paul Cottrell, has extensive knowledge of the hospitality catering and visitor attractions. Working for a range of organisations including Chatsworth House & Waddesdon Manor. As a consultant Paul has worked on feasibility studies, budget planning, hands on training and mentoring colleagues in the sector.

The sessions will also be supported by Officers from South East Museum Development and Share Museums East.

Who are the training sessions aimed at?

People working or volunteering in museums that either already operate a café or are planning to open one up.

Ideal for those who have a supervisory role or are involved in the development of their café.

Suitable for small to mid size organisations.

Session Outline

Paul will be looking at how you can simplify the process of running a successful café and ensure you concentrate on what is important. This includes managing your people effectively, good planning, controlling your costs and checking if your café is fit for purpose.

A good café should reflect you and your teams creativity and flair; whether you aim to make it a community hub or generate some income. On the day we will include live case studies from around the regions looking at how museums have been able to adopt novel and successful solutions to catering.

This session will make a complex and sometimes challenging enterprise a little bit simpler.

The learning outcomes from the session:

• understand the need to agree your rationale for your café offer
• gain an understanding of people management within the catering context
• able to set measurable objectives when developing a catering offer
• understand how to control costs
• identify which types of service and business models may work for you (assisted service/table service/food to go/seating etc

Booking Information

There are 12 spaces available on the session for museums in the south east.

Please follow the link below to book your free space on this training session.

Book your place here

By booking a place on to a South East Museum Development training event, you are agreeing to the following :

• To ensure fair distribution, only one representative from each museum can book a place on this training course. Additional bookings from the same museum will go on to a reserve list. Places on this training course will be confirmed by email.
• That you are either a paid staff, a volunteer or a trustee who works within or with a South East museum or heritage organisation which is in Arts Council England’s Accreditation Scheme (either fully accredited or working towards accreditation). Where this is not applicable (i.e. you are a non-accredited museum), you acknowledge that in the event that training is oversubscribed, priority will be given to museums or heritage organisations in the Arts Council England Accreditation Scheme.
• It is a condition of receiving the training provided without charge that the evaluation form is completed by the specified deadline in the email notification. We appreciate you sharing your views with us to inform our programming.
• That we can share your contact details with our training partner for the purpose of booking administration (Share Museums East).

Session delivery and access

Using a virtual platform (Zoom), the facilitators will use a combination of PowerPoint slides, polls and attendee participation with an opportunity for questions and group work in breakout rooms. Auto-transcription will be enabled as standard.

Please make us aware of any access requirements you may have as early as possible to enable us the maximum time to make arrangements and book professional services, if applicable.

Examples of possible requests include, but are not limited to; audio description, advance copy of presentations or resources, resources in specific accessible formats, e.g., Large Print, specific colour contrast.

Contact

If you would like more information on the training please contact our Lead Liaison via the details below.

Stephen Lowy

Museum Development Officer