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- Blogs • Posted by Two Chimps • 04th May 2020
The Larder – Oakham – An Award-Winning Café
Serving local produce, freshly prepared food and us!
Recently winning ‘Cafe of the Year’ in the Great Food Club Guide; The Larder has achieved big things in a short space of time.
Opened at the end of 2018, they’re in a prime location in Oakham’s busy town. Once a vegan café, the interior is well laid out and welcoming.
Run by owners Iain & Alyson, they are passionate about using and promoting local and independent producers. They go that extra mile to ensure everything is local.
Alyson was originally a tax accountant, and Iain was a business analyst. It was when they went to work in a ski resort that they started cooking. Iain then retrained to become a chef and is in charge of the savoury cooking side. Alyson is front of house and baking.
From Hambleton Bakery bread complimented with The Feast and the Furious smoked butter, they have a weekly changing menu full of freshly prepared delights. There’s a blackboard full of all the local producers they use, all within a 20-mile radius.
Yummy Food
A big roll of brown paper displayed on the wall shows the weekly menu. They serve breakfast, brunch, lunch, takeaway, coffee, cakes; you name it! There is something for everyone and they’re also vegan friendly. They have lunch options, vegan cakes and even their creamy, delicious hot chocolate is vegan friendly. Oh, and their chocolate and coconut cake is TO DIE FOR too!
There’s clearly been a lot of thought gone into everything. The menu is small; however, there is so much choice. The takeaway boxes and cups are all recyclable. They have a rent-a-cup amnesty where you can buy a re-useable coffee cup and return it at any time for a full refund to reduce the use of takeaway cups.
Perhaps best of all is their Free Filter Friday, where they offer a free Two Chimps Coffee, to anybody with the choice of a small donation to a charity.
Coffee
As a fellow local and independent business, we’ve loved having The Larder on board with us since they opened.
We pride ourselves in delivering fresh speciality coffee to all of our customers as we believe that ‘fresh is best’. They place orders on Mondays, we roast the coffee on a Tuesday, and deliver to them, for free, on a Wednesday – you can’t get fresher than that!
As well as fresh coffee delivered weekly, we also spent time with them setting up their coffee machine to make sure they were getting the best from their coffee every time. We trained all the staff on how to use the espresso machine and how to steam the milk to create lovely latte art. They’re currently serving our Nicaraguan coffee, The Kittens Onesie and our chemical-free decaf; Isle of View.
Not only do we provide all of our wholesale customers with fresh coffee, free delivery and free training. We also offer free point of sale material too. This includes strut boards with our awesome logo, leaflets with plenty of information about where your coffee comes from and who we are along with A-boards and posters too.
Online Support
We support all our wholesale coffee customers where we can through our website, with blogs like this, and on social media.
The Larder has a great social presence with over 1,200 followers on Instagram. This is fantastic as it means we can drool over the pictures of their lovely food! Platforms such as Instagram are the perfect place to get people excited about small, local businesses.
It relies on the likes, comments and shares of posts to get people interested and informed about small companies that they may not otherwise realise existed. In just 18 months, they have gone from 4 likes on their 1st post to 153 likes on their latest.
As a result, being connected with The Larder means that they are promoting our lovely fresh coffee to customers who may not have heard about us, and vice versa.
Therefore, we try our best to support all of our customers in every way we can.
Award-Winning Cafe
Winners of the awards are nominated by the readers and members of the Great Food Club.
Between July 1st and July 31 2019, they had over 3,000 votes. From here they pick the top four most voted businesses in each category and then shortlist them to finalists.
Finally, they are then judged and chosen as the winners.
Above all, we think The Larder winning best café in 2020 is well deserved and will happily take some credit as your No1 supplier! ?
Buy some of the coffee that they serve today.
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