It’s this generosity of spirit that has underpinned a successful career in tabletop, first as founder and director of Continental Chef Supplies, which he sold to Bunzl, and more recently at Goodfellow & Goodfellow, a booming U.K. tabletop supplier which he owns and runs with his wife Valda.
In many ways G & G has all the traits of a well-oiled family business: major decisions are made as a couple, there is a low turnover of staff and customer service is taken seriously. Paul and Valda’s characters are imprinted onto every facet of the business. Paul brings a sharp eye for a product, contacts from his CCS days and experience as a chef, which allows him to get in the mind of his customers. Valda has the sharp business skills and creative eye. Together, Paul tells me, ‘they live and breathe gastronomy”.
It has proved a winning combination.
In just over four years Paul and Valda have built a business with sales figures most family enterprises could only dream about. But more than that, they have helped shape the tabletop market in Britain perhaps more than any other company. When I sit down to chat with Paul he has a copy of Time Out’s latest magazine profiling London’s Top 100 London Restaurants, on the cover is one of his plates in action at Jason Atherton’s Social Eating House – which is no coincidence.
“Paul Hood (chef at Social Eating House) recently changed his tabletop,” Paul explains in typically ebullient fashion. “I emailed him and said: ‘The tabletop is too boring for Soho, this is a one-star restaurant, the plates have got to be more interesting.’ He said: ‘Well, what do you think I should be doing?’ I said: ‘Come to the showroom and let’s have a chat’. And you come up with a selection of plates that are more tethered to him.”
Chef Jason Atherton, a canny businessman in his own right, is one of Paul’s most loyal customers. He explains that “G & G Goodfellows offer an exceptional and very personal service. They make sure they completely understand what we are trying to achieve and go above and beyond to find us what we’re looking for.”
Paul underlines this point: “It’s not about going through a catalogue and choosing a plate. It’s about asking the chef, ‘What type of food are you serving, what’s the operation, how many covers?’ There’s so many relevant things to giving someone advice. We nearly always start with the menu and work back to the plate. Not plate to menu. We get chefs walk in to our showroom at 8 o’clock in the morning on their way to work. They’ve thought of a dish but they don’t have a plate for it. That’s the way it works.”
The way Paul thinks about tabletop – menu to plate – chimes with how the industry has developed in recent years. Gone are the days when plates were an afterthought to the construction of a dish. Now chefs understand that plates are part of a dish.
As a result of this shift, tabletop trends move quickly, and Paul and Valda direct much of their focus on spotting new developments in order to stay ahead of the curve.
“It’s keeping an eye on all the different types of cuisine. We look at the food chefs are cooking and look at the right product to go with the food. Say we’re doing a project with somebody coming into the UK from a different ethnic area: we research that cuisine, we look at what the food style is, and find the right manufacturers to make the right products to fit that,” says Paul. “If you take our last portfolio, Number 3, for example, we featured Rohit Ghai. Rohit was -until recently – the Corporate Chef for JKS Restaurants – Gymkhana, Hoppers, Bao. We featured Rohit very prominently in most of the catalogue. Now, not just since then but before, we are dealing with a lot of Indian chefs in London. So I’m not saying they follow Rohit, but they embrace the quality and great innovation. And they appreciate the fact that we recognize their cuisine is really important in the market.”
While top chefs are magpies in the sense that they forage ideas and inspiration from peers, they are also peacocks; they love to stand out. Paul Goodfellow recognizes this and works with manufacturers that offer flexibility and scope for personalization.
“We wanted to create a business that was more bespoke, more flexible than any other business in the market,” he says. “I’ve got stoneware from France called Montgolfier, which are all the glazes you see on Time Out. What Montgolfier gives me is eighteen basic glazes and twenty reactive glazes. So I’ve got thirty eight glazes plus all the shapes to work with. If you think of the scenario of having thirty eight glazes and all the shapes, you need a lot of customers to go through that.”
It’s not just in its products that Goodfellows innovates, but through their digital strategy, too. The website is slick and elegant, a benchmark for competitors, while their social media channels are constantly updated with catchy call-to-actions and beautiful images of food. As a B2B company, it gives them a real point of difference.
“We use social media purely for market awareness. Young chefs come to the fore who didn’t know you before and we’ve got to know them through social media and they’ve got to know us.
“We’ve also got a creative team that we’ve worked with for a long time. Our designer and photographer have worked with us now for fifteen years. Our photographer will only do food stuff for us because we value his product.”
“We have a photographer that takes amazing photos of plates. You look at every shot we do and you can see the shape of the plate. I look at photographs from some of our competitors’s catalogues and they just take photos of food. Why would you take a photo of a deep bowl from above when you can’t see it’s a bowl? You’ve got to show the plate and you’ve got to show the food – it’s not rocket science.”
Paul has a gift for making the complicated seem simple. But when it comes to customer service, perhaps his biggest asset, he takes nothing for granted.
“Yes, I have amazing relationships, amazing contacts – I probably know more chefs in the UK than any other person – but you know what, you have to have the service to go with it. You don’t retain the relationships for thirty years unless you keep the customer happy.”
He hammers this point home with a lovely anecdote about Daniel Clifford, now one of the UK’s foremost chefs, who reminded Paul when they sat down to discuss the tabletop concept for one of his restaurants that he had bought his first chef knife off him when he was a lowly commis chef decades ago. He had always remembered Paul and always remembered the service he had provided.
Perhaps this is what Paul Goodfellow means when he rounds off our chat by telling me:
“There’s some magic that we have, otherwise we wouldn’t be doing it.”
– Isaac Parham
Photos:
http://www.cateringinsight.com/15187-goodfellows-vows-to-wow-with-table-talk/
http://www.cateringinsight.com/15003-goodfellows-seals-the-deal-to-equip-urban-kitchen/
