Opposite Catering

Opposite Café was originally established as a hangout for the art students of Leeds University; built to bring fair-trade coffee, healthy affordable food and a community space. They operate a café opposite Leeds Uni as well as an upscale premises in the Victoria Quarter.

The Opposite team pride themselves on making all their food from scratch using seasonal and locally sourced ingredients. Coffee is directly traded with the growers and varies depending on the season. Packaging is reusable or fully compostable and all suppliers are vetted to ensure that they meet standards for sustainable business practice.

As well as running two cafés, Opposite Catering deliver a wide range of food and beverages for meetings, conferences and events of up to 200 attendees. That’s where Fridaygirl comes in. Our role is to run the catering business, looking after the needs of the catering customers all the way from enquiry and quote generation, café/production liaison and delivery scheduling to after-care, invoicing and credit control.

Founder and Director, Lou Henry says:

“We have been working with Fridaygirl for over 5 years now and during that time they have taken over running our entire catering operation remotely (we are in Leeds, they are in Cornwall!). In one year alone our turnover more than trebled, and without their admin backup we would never have managed to keep up during such a sharp growth phase.

Whilst our in-house team are busy serving café customers or preparing and delivering catering orders, we know that Fridaygirl are busy in the background answering sales enquiries, scheduling deliveries, liaising with customers and making sure the invoicing and customer payments are kept up to date. They are effectively running our entire catering business except for manufacture and delivery.

The Fridaygirl team have been particularly great at understanding our menus and the ingredients used in each dish, so they can advise customers what to order taking into account tricky allergies, food intolerances and other dietary requirements.

Many of our customers are on such good terms with the team that they assume that they work in the cafe and often come in asking to speak to them!

Given the amount of admin work they do, I considered looking to replace them with a full time salaried catering manager a while back, but to be honest the service I get from these guys is so great I’d be hard pressed to get someone who would be that good and deliver the same level of service to our catering customers and the team here.”

www.oppositecafe.co.uk