How Boston Tea Party is building a world-beating employer brand on purpose
Scrapping single use coffee cups is just the latest step that the Bristol-born chain has taken to drive social and commercial impact.
In June 2018, café chain Boston Tea Party grabbed national headlines through a bold initiative. Under the banner of “No Excuse For Single Use”, the family-owned café chain banned single use coffee cups from its cafes forever. Instead, customers can buy or borrow reusable cups, available in a variety of sizes and designs, at a subsidised rate.
It may seem like a risky move for the fast-growing café chain, which now boasts 22 cafes in cities and towns across the South West and Midlands. But it’s a decision that sits firmly within the company’s stated purpose: to “Make Things Better”.
Boston Tea Party is committed to doing the chain café differently. Unlike other high street chains, everything is made on site from scratch. The cafés use free-range meat and eggs, organic milk from Yeo Valley and salad leaves from the Severn Project social enterprise farm in Bristol, all of which contribute to its three-star rating from the Sustainable Restaurant Association. It also uses its spaces to promote local community projects, including bringing social change-makers together with supportive customers and businesses.
Purpose spoke to Sam Roberts, co-founder of Boston Tea Party, about the impact that purpose and values have had on the business.
Q. Boston Tea Party already had a strong reputation as ethical and sustainable café chain. Why did you choose to go further and invest in defining your purpose?
It’s clear to me that having a well-communicated purpose will differentiate a business to employees and to customers. Ultimately, our challenge is to buck the trend of soulless chain cafes. That’s why we use local produce, cook from scratch and make sure that no two of our cafes are the same — they each have their own unique personality and reflect their local neighbourhood.
That’s what we stand for. We’re growing rapidly, and we don’t want to see that eroded as we grow. By first articulating and then living our purpose, we can stay true to who we are as we grow.
Our purpose is to “Make Things Better”: our spaces, our food and drink, but most importantly our people and the communities we serve.
Q. What steps did you take to develop and embed your purpose?
We worked with The House to map out our purpose and values, and to better understand the relationship between them. It was important to structure the values so that they could be applied to our purpose, and also to everyday interactions. We did a lot of hard work to make sure that the values were expressed as “values in action” — stuff that we would actually say to each other in the cafes and in the kitchen.
The House then packaged and framed our purpose, story and values in a simple, powerful and succinct way.
Q. What impact has this had on your business?
We’re already seeing higher retention and it has certainly helped magnetise our employer brand.
We now have a full induction process for new staff built around our purpose of “make things better”, and we are really amplifying our purpose and values in our recruitment channels.
People are leaving the major national chains to join us. Best of all, our existing staff are acting as recruiters, finding talented and like-minded people on our behalf.
Q. Presumably retention is a big challenge in your sector?
Absolutely, holding onto people can be a major challenge, and constantly replacing them is very costly. As a yardstick, the best in the industry is probably Pret A Manger, who still has something like a 50% turnover.
Our ambition is to reduce our annual staff turnover to similar levels. A big part of attracting staff and delivering on our purpose has been to communicate that we offer proper jobs here, jobs where you can learn and grow — as the business grows, you grow along with it. We make everything from scratch, so there are a lot of skills to learn and perfect. And we don’t just skill our people for the job, we skill them for life.
Q. What are the challenges you have faced embedding your purpose?
It’s always a challenge to balance our social ambition and progress with the commercial realities we face, and to build a sustainable business model.
It’s also important for us to help the whole organisation understand why our purpose is worth getting excited about, because that gives everyone the context for sweating the detail. That means the story has to be well told everywhere, inside and out.
[Disclosure: We’re proud to say that Boston Tea Party is a client of The House, the purposeful business consultancy which publishes Purpose magazine]
A view from the kitchen
Kitchen manager Andrew shares how and why he came to Boston Tea Party and why he loves his job
“I have worked for 15 years in catering and I hit a point in my career and my personal life where I felt I needed a change to strive to find a better work-life balance. From the moment I applied, it has been nothing but a pleasure to be part of a company like BTP.
I had no idea of the level of fresh food production involved in managing a BTP kitchen until I got here but was pleasantly surprised, as being a career chef it gives me a lot of job satisfaction to be working with a menu completely made from scratch, as well as learning new skills due to the amount of baking we do here.
The other bonus was to work for a company who genuinely live their values. There isn’t another chain out there that does more to benefit the communities they serve as well as always striving to improve our impact on the wider environment. Our green credentials are second to none and as this is something I strongly believe in it makes me feel that my job role extends beyond the kitchen walls and can actually benefit things on a larger scale.”
To find out more about how The House can help your business bring its purpose to life, get in touch with us at 01225 780000, email graham@thehouse.co.uk or visit us at thehouse.co.uk.
