Piglets Adventure Farm is a family attraction based near York. The business has been run by the Sykes family for over 5 years during which time Piglets has established a strong reputation as a premier family attraction in Yorkshire, welcoming over 100,000 visitors each year.
Sturdy Foods were approached by Piglets to help set up a pizza operation at their Barn Café in early 2019.
After talking through the project with both Edward, the business owner, and Katherine, the Catering Manager, Sturdy Foods identified the following needed to be achieved.
- The ability to serve a lot of pizzas in a short time period. Customers do not want to wait a long time for their pizzas at busy times and especially with hungry children to feed!
- Skill levels needed to be manageable due to the operation using seasonal staff.
- The pizza preparation and serving area is small and needed to be as space efficient as possible.
- Quality is important to Piglets as a business that values its reputation for great customer experience and this needed to be reflected in the quality of the pizzas.
Sturdy Foods identified that the product most suited to Piglets’ requirements would be the sourdough sauced pizza base. Using this product minimises the processes and ingredients that Piglets needed to use and gave them a ready to use product that is easy to prepare and serve quickly yet still provides a high quality pizza.
Sturdy Foods also identified that cooking the pizzas needed to be as quick and simple as possible. After consulting with our partners at High Speed Oven specialists, highspeedovens.co.uk, it was identified that to serve the volume of customers required on a daily basis, two Merrychef E2s ovens would be needed. These ovens cook a pizza within 2 minutes and require very little training to operate. This would mean that a high volume of customers can be served day in day out with no consistency issues.
Piglets were invited to test both the pizzas and oven at our test facility and went ahead with the purchase of the two Merrychef ovens, which were installed within a week so as to have them in place ready for the upcoming busy Spring and Summer period. Sturdy Foods and High Speed Ovens both attended site before launch to help train and advise staff on serving the pizzas.
Here is what Katherine, Catering Manager at Piglets Adventure Farm, had to say about both how the enquiry was dealt with and how things have gone since using Sturdy Foods products.
“Piglets Adventure Farm prides itself on outstanding customer experiences and, after looking at various ways for us to serve our customers with great pizza, we realised that we needed a solution to ensure our customers received a consistently high quality product and that with limitations with staffing and skill levels, we would struggle to achieve this without help. We then contacted Sturdy Foods to see how they could help us set up our planned pizza operation.
Sturdy Foods and partner company High Speed Ovens worked together in identifying how we could launch this successfully and we were immediately impressed with the care and attention to detail they showed in helping us explore the options for preparing and cooking the pizzas.
We were operating on a tight deadline with the new season fast approaching and both companies went out of their way to ensure we were ready for this and that our staff were sufficiently trained to serve the pizzas.
Our customers give amazing feedback on the pizzas, and we are extremely happy with the product, ovens and overall service we received from both Sturdy Foods and High Speed Ovens. We are now selling thousands of pizzas each season with a very easy to manage system that our staff find super easy to operate and that gives our customers a fantastic product. We’ve had several positive comments on our pizzas online through review sites and feel it has enhanced our customer experience, helping generate repeat visits.“
