Kerb uses Deputy to streamline business operations

It took six years for travelling street food trader, Petra Barran, to realise her dream of bringing change to the street food experience in Britain.

What started as a single street food van soon became a collective in 2010, when Petra joined forces with two other passionate foodies to create eat.st.

Two years later, Petra branched out on her own to found KERB, an organised food market, event and catering business with a growing number of traders across London.

Ollie Hunter, Head of Development explains the concept. “We do lunch markets, public events, and private catering. We also do a lot of business development with new traders, to get them up to speed about how to run their business.”

KERB’s mission is simple: create a legitimate platform for talented, independent street food businesses; improve the quality of food served on London’s streets; and create delicious and fun experiences for everyone in the space between buildings.

Even with a staff of 20 employees, the KERB team had a hard time organising traders for their five markets across London. Scheduling over 90 traders for KERB’s markets each month was a time-consuming and onerous process.

Ollie explains: “We used to do the schedule on the back of a napkin and plan a week’s rota on that, which took maybe about two days to plan a month.”

The business then moved to a rudimentary spreadsheet, but as the number of traders grew, “it became a really, really complicated spreadsheet,” he adds.

In addition, communicating changes to the rota became problematic for the KERB team. Ollie continues: “We are getting to a point in the business where we want to scale and get bigger, and the spreadsheets we were running with were not scalable, and we couldn’t add stuff and communicate that to our traders very well.”

The KERB team needed better processes to help them manage their growing number of traders in a more efficient and effective way.

KERB implemented Deputy in January 2018, making use of the rostering and integration features to grow their business and help drive the street food revolution in London.

Deputy’s flexibility has helped KERB streamline their management and communication processes, saving time and increasing revenue as a result.

Ollie describes how KERB uses the scheduling feature in the app differently to other businesses. “We use Deputy for planning where our traders should be and to basically schedule in our traders at different markets.”

KERB has also improved their processes for signing up new traders through Deputy’s ability to integrate with other apps like Airtable and Zapier.

“Having a platform [like Deputy] makes it so much easier” and ensures that communication between management and traders is effective and efficient.

Now, the KERB team have more time to expand their operations and focus on mentoring new traders.

“Using Deputy means that we can operate our existing markets efficiently enough to free up time to take on new opportunities and help other businesses [with their scheduling] as well,” Ollie explains.

As a result, by investing their time in trader development, private catering and other events, KERB is making more money now than ever before.

With more time, increased revenue and fewer operational worries, KERB will continue mentoring new traders to grow their business and create the best street food experience in London.