La Place

Objective

The acquisition of La Place by Jumbo Supermarkets paves the way for La Place to invest in growth. This growth will be realized in two ways.

1. Within the Netherlands, through opening company-owned locations, including the acquisition of AC Restaurants along highways.
2. Abroad at travel locations and on Dutch airports through multi-unit franchisees.

Koelewijn & Partners has been engaged by La Place to prepare the organization for this growth via franchising.

Partner Profile

La Place collaborates with large financially strong international partners such as HMS Host, SSP, and Areas Elior. The partners of La Place operate hospitality and retail concepts worldwide at travel locations like airports and train stations, ensuring that La Place can become a global brand with relatively few partners, minimal own investment, and risk.

Challenges

• La Place is a Dutch brand where all communication (manuals, recipes, etc.) is in Dutch.
• Internationalization introduces both language barriers and cultural challenges.
• Sustainability and freshness are important core values for La Place, meaning that almost all ingredients must be locally sourced while still delivering consistent quality.
• La Place works with non-professionals who must cook in front of the customer while simultaneously assisting them. This is a rather unique approach internationally.

About La Place

La Place started as a hospitality concept within V&D department stores. Even when V&D began to struggle, the La Place concept remained consistently successful. This success was reason enough during the V&D era to take the first steps towards independent restaurants outside the department stores. When V&D ceased to exist, the standalone restaurants of La Place were acquired by Jumbo Supermarkets to focus again on growth.

Every year, more than 15 million guests enjoy everything that La Place freshly prepares. Natural, fresh daily, and homemade are core values of La Place, and taste is the top priority.

This must be the best in all dishes and products. To achieve that, they work with fresh, honest, and pure ingredients, preferably locally sourced and, where possible, organic. All these ingredients are delivered to all locations early every morning, allowing them to work with the freshest ingredients each day.

La Place operates within each restaurant with various concepts to meet the diverse needs of their guests. They serve warm meals, salads, soups, sandwiches, pastries, coffee, fresh juices, and smoothies, among other items.

This happens in their own restaurants in the Netherlands, but soon after the acquisition by Jumbo, the first two international pilot locations were opened in Bali, Indonesia, and Toronto, Canada.

The initial results from these restaurants were promising. However, it quickly became clear that there was too little franchise knowledge internally. Further development was needed to grow internationally quickly without compromising quality. For this reason, Koelewijn & Partners was engaged.

Our approach

With a small team of consultants, we first mapped out the current situation. Interviews were conducted with various individuals within each department at La Place. This quickly highlighted the challenges La Place is facing, both in general and specifically on the franchise front. We then developed an action plan that matched the internal capacity and priorities at the time. To achieve effective and rapid results, we worked weekly on-site within the La Place organization. Subsequently, we introduced Agile project management methodologies at La Place. We immediately tackled the actions with the highest priority, while other actions were prioritized on the backlog.

The result

Because progress became tangible for everyone, internal attention and enthusiasm for franchising grew. This effectively addressed the first challenge that emerged from the check-up.

Working Agile also enabled us to quickly respond to developments and new insights. As a result, the progress and buy-in of all stakeholders were effectively monitored.

To properly translate the complex concept of La Place to the international market, we set up an online handbook. This online handbook forms the basis for documenting internal and external information and processes. Everything the franchisees need to know to successfully establish and operate a restaurant is included in the handbook. It's available in multiple languages and, where necessary, includes local adaptations.

Simultaneously, the necessary internal processes were shaped. Efforts were required from every internal department to make franchising a success. Processes were established to effectively transfer the necessary knowledge to the franchise partner and to continuously monitor quality.