Union to scrap breakfast offering following huge losses

Imperial College Union announced its decision to cancel its breakfast offering following substantial financial losses.

From Monday 18th February, Union Breakfast will cease to be served and the opening hours in FiveSixEight will revert to 12pm. The decision was taken a week ago, with the breakfast offering being described as causing the Union to “absolutely haemorrhage money”.

Speaking to Felix, Rob Tomkies, Union President, said: “There was an initial spike in the performance of sales and so on, which is obviously really good, but actually it then started to peter out. Towards the end, we’d get about £16-17 net a day, and that’s without staffing costs or anything, which equates to four meals a day. At which point, the decision was made that it wasn’t financially viable. If you have one staff member on, they’re earning £8-9 an hour, they’re there for five hours – you’re minus £20 a day. If we carried it on, it’s predicted to cost us £8000, just because of staffing costs outweighing the food performance.”

Claudia Caravello, Deputy President (Financial Services), was allegedly not consulted prior to the decision being made, highlighting a possible disconnect between members of the Senior Management Group (SMG) and the student-elected Officer Trustees. One member of staff commented, “largely it’s been Julia and SMG taking things on”.

In an e-mail informing Union staff of the decision to end Union Breakfast, Julia Mattingley, Head of Commercial Services, stated: “I am extremely proud of the effort, creativity and willingness of our amazing Bars & Catering team to take on a new project at the busiest time in our year and without full resources. You’ve worked hard and it hasn’t gone unnoticed.”

Union Breakfast was announced in response to the the widely unpopular decision to scrap breakfast in the Senior Common Room (SCR) at the start of the 2017-18 academic year. Felix was provided with a joint statement by Julia Mattingley and Rob Tomkies:

“The breakfast project came about as a result of the five year Commercial Strategy and a steer towards extending and improving our food offer generally across the Commercial Services, to include bar food, functions catering and retail grab ‘n’ go. The work first started on the early stages of the breakfast project in April 2018 with a view to launching during the Welcome period. We were always clear that this was a trial – as this was not something we had tried before – and there were several unknowns at launch mainly due to the timing of the launch and several operational challenges that we were (and still are) experiencing at the time. We got amazing feedback from our membership which we will factor into all of our future plans going forward. We have taken the decision to cease breakfast service for the time being in order to lay firm foundations. These foundations will set us up for the future and ensure the long term viability of our outlets in order to better serve our membership.”

After the disastrous performance of Union Breakfast during its trial, stakeholders, such as students and Union staff have raised the question of why the trial was launched in the first place without firm foundations already being in place.

According to Rob, competition with the breakfast offering in the Library Café was a substantial obstacle: “One of the main factors we struggled with is the Library Café do run breakfast, it’s a very similar offering to our own and, overall Campus Services put in £1m subsidy a year. Which means they can go down to costs that we literally just can’t match.”

This comes as the latest development in the ongoing efforts being made to improve the catering offerings on campus. Rob informed Felix that, “Claudia has been putting a lot of work into the food offering on campus with Campus Services because they have a considerably bigger budget than us, they can do all sorts of things.”

Despite the failure of this short-lived breakfast trial, students are being reassured that this does not mark the end for breakfast offerings on campus. Reflecting on this, Rob added: “We are very much still looking into reviewing breakfast but, at this point, we need to actually look at all the information we got, the customer feedback, the performance reports and so on. Actually try and figure out why is it that we’re only making £17 a day. Why is it only four people are having food here each day? When it comes round to next budgeting, look at what the lessons learnt are because students do need food but clearly what we’re doing at the moment isn’t what they want”.