Where we do it

Host operates from Aberdeen to Portsmouth and from Wales to East Anglia, through local regional and contract support managers who are attached to our data centre at Liss, from which they gain access to the full range of on-line support services such as the Matrix QMS, Caternet and central e-mail.

What this means is that our clients always have local people looking after their site understanding local and regional issues when looking at catering services. That said, there is a strong one:one support management line through Douglas Wood (commercial), Jerry Brand (sales & marketing), Mike Chubb (technical services) and Ann-Marie Houghton (finance & IT).

Our support lines between catering manager and their team and the centre are shown here – we have a routine line management structure as identified above, and the support of a central ‘H-Team’ and ‘A-Team’ for general support and local skills and mobile management services respectively.

Our UK growth commitment to our clients is to invest in a local contract support manager if their operation is more than 50 miles away from the nearest existing Host client, and immediately tagging the local area as an 'enterprise zone'.

That means that if we are investing in a contract support manager for your site, you will also be investing in us through giving us your contract. That joint investment makes a partnership and that is one of the best ways forward for the 1:1 client relationship that we seek.

Our marketing group is then tasked with investigating business opportunities to fill out the region, thereby making the area strong from a support perspective. We realise that we need to support our contracts as we build these enterprise zones and are happy to invest in A-Team mobile and project managers who can fill in at short notice as well as leading the mobilisation of new business. So far as the support for general and basic cooking staff, we look to advertise locally for casual staff who may be local mothers or early retired people who want sporadic and occasional work, but who can be trained in basic food hygiene and are much cheaper and reliable than other sources of occasional labour.

We also operate to a continuous improvement philosophy which allows us to operate as a team by constantly looking for ways to improve what we do and we encourage all our people to ‘Challenge the recipe…’ of traditional thinking in order to innovate and show an entrepreneurial spirit. Our management philosophy is to ‘keep it simple’ and to ‘SMILE’ -
Sharing knowledge, Meeting customer expectations, Improving continuously, Looking after each other, and Entrepreneurship. All our people are inducted into the company and trained in this manner.



What we do

Business & Industry
From staff restaurants and factory canteens to Directors dining and hospitality services. Host will develop a personal service plan to create menus, dining environments and service styles to manage your catering services the way you want, and to your budget parameters.

Education
Host fully understands the needs of bursars, students, staff and parents within the scope of Independent education, and our growing list of top UK public schools is evidence that our fresh food and transparent accounting is working well.

Colleges and Universities need a more commercial approach to student feeding and at Host we understand how in-house brands such as our FoodFair™ and traditions work well together to create a strong student food service system.

Healthcare
Host Healthcare ranges from the elderly and young through physical and mental disabilities, either at temporary centres such as hospitals or more permanent environments such as homes and hospices. Each sector demands an individual solution within a caring environment. Host offers a bespoke service to cater for each community, ensuring safety and good service for customers through our selection, training and monitoring process.

Facilities Management
Whilst our core business is catering, we do have clients who have contracted us to look after their cleaning and other soft FM services. We set the staff establishment correctly with the supervisory levels to ensure standards are achieved, and we have the expert support advice to focus our resources to the right areas to complete the tasks required.