Feeding FDI companies has built a healthy business for Urban Picnic

04 APR 2018

Gavin Prendergast had already been thinking about going into business for himself with an enterprise that would tap into his love for food. Then the multinationals came calling.
 
The story of his company, Urban Picnic, is just one example of the local impact that foreign direct investment brings to Ireland. The company has grown from Prendergast alone to 185 employees, serving up to 12,000 meals every day.
 
Back in 2009, Prendergast had been looking around for gaps in the market. He noticed that tech companies were bringing a culture where free food was not just a staff perk; it had to be healthy too. Yet most traditional catering providers didn’t offer fresh, wholesome eating options.
 
Prendergast seized his chance. Not that it was easy. “I used to wake up at 3am and bake bread and chop fruit. I’d drive over to Facebook’s offices in my battered old Saab,” he remembers.
 

Big business buys Irish

It was part of Facebook’s plan to support local businesses as much as possible, but even at that, Prendergast describes his case as one big company “taking a bet” on a one-man band. “The really nice thing about Facebook at the time was that any other company of that size looking for a catering option would just have looked at the large multinational catering firms. I had approached Facebook, and probably from their own startup background, I might have been on their radar a bit more as a young guy, who was passionate about his business and with good ideas. It was a case of ‘let’s give him a shot’. These days, companies prefer to see your client list and your experience.” he says.
 
“By choosing me, they felt I had the passion and dedication to make it work. Facebook was my life, really. I had left a good job and used all of my money to get the business going. They knew that if they picked me, that I would give them my unrivalled attention.”

 
Local impact

Even now, Facebook remains a key customer: 100 of Urban Picnic’s catering staff work from on-site kitchens at the company’s three Irish offices. But Prendergast was determined all along that Facebook would be a launching pad to growing his business, not an end in itself. At one point, Urban Picnic was working with LinkedIn, Twitter, Airbnb, Zynga and Facebook at the same time.
 
More recently, the company has been working with domestic Irish names, and has struck deals with Smurfit Business School and the Royal College of Surgeons, among others. Prendergast says this shows how the culture of influential multinationals can permeate more traditional businesses. “I get invited to meetings at least once a month where a company wants to follow the same approach as Facebook. Indigenous companies are seeing what’s going on, and there’s also a lot of new tech business like software companies and development companies coming into Ireland,” he says.
 
Working closely with large multinationals has benefited how Prendergast runs his business. Urban Picnic has “very streamlined and efficient” purchasing systems thanks to the insight gained from working with large global operations. Prendergast also borrows from the playbook on strong employee relations; he holds monthly appraisals with every staffer in his company. “If I wasn’t working with tech companies and big multinationals, I probably wouldn’t be as up to speed on this as I am now,” he says.
 
As well as business lessons learned through observation and osmosis, Prendergast says Facebook proactively took steps to help him improve his business. In 2009, Josef Desimone was Facebook’s then ‘culinary overlord’, responsible for the company’s US catering operations. Though he was a hard taskmaster, Prendergast is grateful for the opportunity and the two remained in close contact for almost four years. “He mentored me, and I thought that was really nice. They didn’t just pick someone to partner with, but put a lot of energy into me.”

The Sunday Times

Techies go to work on gourmet fare

What do Facebook staff eat? What's on the Twitter menu? Adrian Weckler meets the chef who cooks for Ireland's tech giants

GROWING up in the idyllic surroundings of Cashel Bay in Connemara, where his family ran the Zetland Country House Hotel, Gavin Prendergast knew he wanted to start his own business one day. “I didn’t care if it was a sweet shop, as long as it was mine,” he said. Unsurprisingly he stayed closer to his hospitality roots, establishing Urban Picnic in 2009, a catering company that has contracts with some of the biggest names in social media including Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Prendergast studied hotel management at Shannon College of Hotel Management before working in a series of prestigious establishments including George V in Paris, Neil Perry’s Rockpool Bar & Grill in Sydney and the Gordon Ramsay restaurant at the Ritz-Carlton Powerscourt hotel. He left the Ritz-Carlton to enrol on a start-your-own-business course at the National College of Ireland by night, working as the food and beverage manager of a business centre in Fitzwilliam Square by day. “I had to pay my way while figuring out what kind of business to set up,” he said. At the time a Facebook “landing team”, a small group of people tasked with preparing for the arrival of a full-scale team, were setting up in Dublin. “I had an American friend who was always telling me about how amazing the food was at Facebook in San Fransisco and how all these new online companies were really into good food,” he said. “Fifteen years ago you couldn’t get a decent cup of coffee in Dublin,” said Prendergast. “Now you can get speciality coffee all across the country. Equally, 15 years ago there weren’t that many great restaurants outside of Dublin, now there’s hardly a part of the country where you can’t get a great meal. “The way I saw it, the only part of the trade that was still stuck in the dark ages was the catering sector.” Catering has long been the Cinderalla of the hospitality sector, allied with the word “industrial” and associated in people’s minds with hospitals, prisons and school dinners. “Corporate catering was much the same, it was still meat and two veg. There was nothing healthy and light, and that’s where I saw an opportunity.” He reckoned traditional catering stalwarts such as chicken and chips or lasagne weren’t likely to hit the spot for Facebook, a company that was going to have a young and multicultural workforce. “I came up with a concept called ‘clean food’ — light and healthy, with almost no butter, cream or flour. The kind of food you can eat for lunch and not be stuck to your chair for the afternoon.” The person in charge of setting up Irish operations put him in touch with Facebook’s “culinary overlord”, Josef Desimone. “Initially I thought the title was a joke but that’s actually his title,” said Prendergast. After an initial pitch over the phone, and a conversation that continued for many weeks, Prendergast was finally given a shot — he was allowed to provide breakfast at the new Facebook offices for three months. A rival would do lunch and dinner. Prendergast hopped in his car and drove to Connemara to explain the opportunity to his siblings, and ask for a €10,000 loan. He bought a van, equipment, and got to work in his kitchen, rising at 3am to bake seven different types of bread, roast hazelnuts and blend juices, ready for dropping off at 6.30am. His trial ran from September to December and was utterly stressful. “I can remember delivering in ice and snow and running every red light because I was afraid I’d skid if I braked,” he said. “I had to get there because if I messed up even once, I’d have blown my chance.” Further pressure came when Desimone arrived in Dublin to shadow Prendergast for a day. “He was a great guy, helped me carry out the bins and everything, but I’ve never been as exhausted as I was having him with me for a whole day — it was so stressful.” On the plus side, the feedback was almost immediately positive. “I had people telling me they were getting out of bed for my breakfasts.” By Christmas, he was told that not only was he to continue with breakfasts, but would be providing lunch and dinner too. He moved the company, by then called Urban Picnic, into a subsidised unit in the Liffey Trust, a not-for-profit organisation which assists start-up entrepreneurs, and took on his first staff, including a chef. The Liffey Trust was particularly supportive. “There were times when they’d wait for the rent because I was having trouble finding it. They just propped me up throughout.” Soon he was serving 200 meals a day. “My father had always said to us, ‘If you’re going to do something, do it better than anyone else,’ ” he said. “I felt we could do even better.” He drew up a list of his top five chefs in the country and approached each to explain his idea of wanting to provide light and healthy restaurant quality food in an office environment. One of them, Adrian Roche, a former chef patron of Jacob’s Ladder restaurant in Dublin, came on board. It was a huge coup for Prendergast — but it posed a financial problem. “I had to go back to my family and borrow money to pay his salary because, at the time, the company couldn’t actually afford him,” he said “But I knew it would be hugely important to have a chef of his calibre to work with.”

The food, said Prendergast, went “from very good to excellent”. Today he has expanded his client list further, and all bar one of them supplies his Urban Picnic catering to staff for free. “They see the value of having staff eat nutritious, healthy meals that they enjoy,” he said. The biggest challenge facing him now is keeping true to his vision of “clean food” as the business continues to expand rapidly — he serves up to 2,500 meals each day. The company employs 45 people, recorded sales of €1.2m last year and turnover is on track to reach €1.8m this year. It is profitable and, apart from a small bank loan, self-financed. “That goes back to growing up hearing my parents talk about the financial side of the hospitality business over the dinner table as a child,” he said. “I was always aware that there was no point being in business if you’re not turning a profit.”