Good food is bread and butter to this man

Being trendy might bring you a customer once, but if the standard isn't up to scratch, they won't come back

SANDWICHES. Commonly defined as two limp bits of bread with a lump of tasteless stuff in the middle. Eaten quickly, without pleasure, at the office desk. Or so one would think.

But Pret a Manger has revolutionised the humble sandwich. Those nightmare fillings of egg and cress, cottage cheese and pineapple, or - shudder - sandwich spread, have been banished from its aluminium shelves to be replaced with crayfish and roquette, green Thai chicken and, er, egg and cress.

Pret a Manger is the stuff that lunchtime dreams are made of. Besides sandwiches, the Prets sprouting up with increasing regularity across the UK are stacked with tempting fruit juices, low-fat brownies and even sushi.

ot only does the food taste good (it's prepared fresh every day on site, what they don't use that day gets given away to charity at night), its sandwich boxes, coffee cups and brown paper bags have become achingly hip status symbols. In offices up and down the country nipping out to pick up lunch at Pret has increasingly become the cool thing to do.

Julian Metcalfe, co-founder of the company and its chairman, is a sprightly 41-year-old with a tan that looks suspiciously incongruous in Glasgow's January sun. He has arrived in Scotland to open the doors of the latest Pret a Manger, in Edinburgh's Castle Street, and oversee preparations for another two, one in Edinburgh, one in Glasgow, due to open this spring.

One gets the impression the ins and outs of running a business are of little concern to Metcalfe. That he might even, whisper it, find it all a bit boring. "To be honest, Sinclair deals with that side of things," he says, referring to his business partner and co-founder Sinclair Beecham. "What interests me is good food, and good people." No matter, for clearly this partnership has been a successful one for both of them.

The word passion crops up a lot in Pret a Manger's literature, and meeting Metcalfe it's easy to see why. He positively drips enthusiasm, talking animatedly about his company, its products, and how annoyed he'd be if he ever found anyone who made a better brownie than Pret. "My wife made brownies the other day," he says earnestly. "I think she thought they were going to be really special, but to tell you the truth they weren't a patch on the ones we sell."

Pret now has 104 shops across the UK, employing about 2,000 staff. Its turnover is a healthy Pounds 100 million, and with another 20 shops slated to open this year, likely to grow.

Metcalfe contends that money was never a driving motivation in Pret a Manger's creation. "For the first three years we put everything we had into the business and took next to nothing out," he says. "A lot of it was real hard slog but we were so motivated to make it work that we were literally willing to do anything in order to get it off the ground."  

ow, he says, they still feel the same. He and Beecham may have a little more pocket money than they did when the company launched in the mid-eighties, but Beecham still flies India Economy every time he visits New York.

Metcalfe is clearly irritated by the "cool" tag the company has been saddled with. "I'm not against it, but it won't last," he says. "Being trendy might bring you a customer once, or twice, but if the standard isn't up to scratch they won't come back. "

In the summer of last year Pret launched its first New York store. Metcalfe is aware it sounds like trying to sell bibles to the Vatican. "Everyone told us it wouldn't work, that the Americans wouldn't like it." he says. "But we made sure we did it properly. We didn't just parachute in, recruit a few staff and leave them to it. Sinclair moved out to New York for a year to prepare for the launch. We spent a long time looking for the right people to work there and the right site. It wasn't something we took lightly."

So far, they appear to be proving their critics wrong. The shop is packed with squawking New Yorkers fawning over their avocado wraps every lunchtime, and they are looking to open a second one soon.  

The company has never indulged in advertising; "except the car," says Metcalfe, referring to a Mini he bought several years ago and turned into a 12 ft high sandwich, which still makes appearances at shop launches. This aside, Pret has relied more on word-of-mouth to spread its popularity, rather than an expensive marketing campaign.

"If you've got a good product, people will come back for it, and they'll tell others about it as well. We could spend millions on advertising, but how long will the effects of that last? "

Despite the dream team formula of the two men, 18 months ago Metcalfe decided to bite the bullet and bring in a chief executive. "We were getting out of our depth," says Metcalfe. "We had over 70 shops and were employing around 1,200 staff. It was a dangerous situation and we felt things were getting a little ropey. We needed someone who could introduce some solid business sense to the company."

A search began to find a suitable replacement. Eventually they alighted on South African Andrew Rolfe, a Harvard graduate who climbed the ranks at PepsiCo before joining technology company and City darling Bookham, becoming one of the youngest ever directors of a FTSE 100 company. "When we found him we had to persuade him to come and join us," says Metcalfe. "Eventually he did, and he's made an enormous amount of difference to how the company is run."

Metcalfe is keen on looking after his staff, and says they have seemed happier since Rolfe came on board. "Everyone knows what they're doing now, and the company seems calmer somehow. Everything runs more smoothly."

The company has some interesting ideas for the future. Metcalfe, who has young children, is keen to take Pret out of the city and open it up to families. "At the moment it's not a good place to take children at all." he says.

"I certainly wouldn't pay Pounds 1.20 for a bottle of apple juice my son will drink half of and then throw on the floor." A long-term plan is currently in action to launch a chain of family Prets within the next few years.

More pressingly, Pret is finally launching its long-overdue delivery service later this year, which Metcalfe hopes will be primarily accessed online. "It's something that's difficult to get right." he says.

"Delivering sandwiches to offices is a completely different process from selling them in the shops. It's something we've wanted to do for a long time and only now are we beginning to get it worked out."

Metcalfe has obviously invested time and effort into his staff. The company runs a scheme whereby solid silver stars from Tiffany's in New York are presented to members of staff not for good sales or long hours, but if a customer phones or writes about how good their service is.

"In the Glasgow shop recently a woman fell." he says. "Two of our staff looked after her, gave her coffee and helped her recover, so she wrote in to thank them, and they got their silver stars. I can't tell you how proud that made me. That's what really makes me happy in this job."

Back to Top