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Plus, Deli Lites founder Jackie Reid on staying curious and finding your 'secret sauce' in business
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Deli Lites founder Jackie Reid on staying curious and finding your 'secret sauce' in business
By Kellie Gray
Personable is the word to describe Jackie Reid. From the moment we sat down at Deli Lites HQ in Warrenpoint it was clear from both Jackie's demeanour and the carefully-curated team spaces within HQ that Deli Lites is a people-centered organisation.
Our ensuing discussion only served to reinforce that notion. Hard work, determination, curiosity and ingenuity play a huge part in the story of Deli Lites. And, as we spoke, it became clear that these characteristics are not only abundant in Jackie but in the company as a whole.
Jackie - who left school age 16 and went on to SRC Newry to study Media Studies - had her first taste of entrepreneurship when she began working within her sister's business; the first of the Deli Lites sandwich bars.
Jackie said: "As a young girl, I was working there part-time and studying as well and that's really how I got involved in the shop. I loved the customers and the food and I didn't know what I wanted to do but you have to try all these things out.”
This little sandwich bar not only gave Jackie a love for food and customers - it gave her the love of her life and partner in business – husband Brian.
"I met Brian at the sandwich bar,” said Jackie. “He had left school and gone to SRC for Hospitality Management and I met him in the shop making a sandwich, believe it or not. We met over a chicken tikka sandwich!"
Cut from the same crust, Jackie and Brian knew they wanted to go into business for themselves, and with queues forming down the street for Deli Lites' sandwiches, they knew there was demand. But, Jackie said: "We knew we didn't want a cafe or a sandwich bar. We wanted to do something bigger and bring sandwiches all over."
So, they embarked upon what is possibly the most exciting form of market research imaginable - and delved into a 'curiosity' that was to stick with them for life.
Jackie explained: "We borrowed my sister's Peugeot and went on a road trip around Europe to see what was happening in the food to go market.
"We were looking at offerings in petrol forecourts around Europe as they would have been more advanced than Ireland was in food to go 25 years ago. We were getting more food knowledge from Europe to bring back to Ireland.
"As well as knowing the success of my sister's bar in Newry; people wanted quality and innovation and something a wee bit different. So, we knew by putting that knowledge together and giving it to the Irish market that that was going to be a brand new thing."
Armed with inspiration, Jackie and Brian cooked up a plan. A plan that involved going into the Deli Lites kitchen at 1am, while the rest of the country lay sleeping, to begin making sandwiches before the shop opened for business. Jackie did the making and Brian took care of deliveries.
They say team work makes the dream work and, as Jackie attests: "Our first order was 30 sandwiches a day and by the end of the week it was 300."
Business boomed, and rightly so. The pair were unstoppable and in staying true to the recognised Deli Lites quality, demand continued to grow amid their new food-to-go options.
Not before long, they recognised the need for their own premises and moved into their own space in an ‘old fish shop’ in Warrenpoint armed with ‘borrowings from family members’.
"We didn't take a salary for three years. The little bit of income that we had we put back into the business,” said Jackie.
But the move allowed for the pair to bring in more team members. This allowed Jackie to get out of the kitchen and into sales - or as she says: “I moved from working in the business to working on the business”. Semantics - but it makes all the difference.
When it came to generating sales, I asked Jackie: "What was your approach to marketing and advertising in those early days?" And as it transpires, the approach then wasn't all that different to her approach today.
She said: "Our investment over the years in marketing and advertising has really been very little. Our business has grown organically which was really on referrals which is a testament to our quality, our innovation and our service levels. Those three things are the pillars of our success and they are things that every business needs to focus on.
"After our second move, that's when we really started to get big clients like Debenhams cafes, Costa and Sainsbury's. They all came from referrals. It's all organic growth. We don't have an aggressive sales strategy - we don't have to. They see our products, what we are doing, our awards, our investment in the people, a credible company and that sustainability is at the core of our business."
These three pillars are something Jackie is incredibly passionate about.
Quality - it goes without saying - has been a primary concern from day one. It was the reason queues formed down the street, it was the reason people came back time and time again and it's a hugely contributing factor to the company's organic growth.
Said Jackie: "We brought in a quality assurance manager very early on within the first three to five years of business because we knew Deli Lites' success was built on quality and everybody loved our sandwiches.
“So when you're getting referrals from other businesses based on quality and sales then you need to look after that - that's your ‘secret sauce’.
“We really bottled that within the business and looked after and nurtured that. It's probably even more important today than it was on day one."
Innovation - or curiosity as Jackie jointly refers to it - is their ability to stay ahead of the curve, to analyse trends and deliver new and exciting ranges before - sometimes years before - their competitors.
"We are very innovative - we are ahead of our competitors in the sense that we launch products sometimes too soon. That's because we are curious; we are always there looking for the new thing.
“We move with the times. We have launched a new range of high protein wraps. I'm vegan and six years ago we launched the first range in Ireland of plant based sandwiches and wraps and maybe launched too soon.
“There probably wasn't enough people willing to give up meat but now you can see it growing."
And service - the third pillar of Deli Lites - comes in the form of looking after your product from conception to fruition and beyond. Deli Lites do this by managing all of their own logistics and by surrounding themselves with a team of people as passionate as both Brian and Jackie.
“Everything is made on one site in Warrenpoint and we own all of our logistics,” said Jackie. “So we know it can be safely delivered to our clients - we are in control of the whole operation from start to finish.
“People are everything. Being a responsible employer as well we do listen to our staff and understand their circumstances. We do try to be flexible and we have flexible conditions for team members. I'm a working mum and I have three kids. I know what it's like and I know the challenges so we offer that when we can.”
Today, Deli Lites continues to deliver on Jackie and Brian’s shared goal of becoming the global industry leaders in premium food on the move.
Their hot and cold food-to-go ranges have now been rolled out to great success across the UK. From this the team then developed a range of toasties, paninis and burritos that can be deep-frozen for exportation to other countries - which must be so fulfilling when harkening back to those early days of European research.
The company also achieved B-Corp status in 2022; making Deli Lites the ‘first sandwich manufacturer in the world to receive B-Corp accreditation’.
Said Jackie: “B-Corp is an accreditation that is focussed on people, planet and profit and it means you are looking after those three core values and it helps to put forward a sustainability framework around those projects.
“We have to make sure that that's our key focus in our business now. It's about our people and our planet.”
B-Corp is described as ‘using business as a force for good’ - which seems very fitting of an entrepreneur who has been focussed on character, quality and innovation from day one.
In this fast-paced world, we are all guilty of forgetting to stop and smell the flowers. Especially when we are trying to run businesses that employ approximately 300 people. So I asked Jackie to reflect on her first days in business to see if she ever envisioned Deli Lites becoming what it is today.
She replied: “I have been a very determined individual from day dot. Anything I did, I put my heart and soul into it and I sort of knew that if I found something that I was passionate about I would do well at it. Whenever I realised the love and passion I had for it I knew I could bring it to any size I wanted to and I think there is no stopping us!
“People do ask me ‘what's your plan?’ and my plan is to keep going. The world is our oyster. There's no finishing line.”
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