The Real Food Cafe will go head-to-head with five other finalists from across the UK at The Cateys awards ceremony in November.
One of Perthshire’s top diners has made it through to the final of The Cateys, an awards ceremony hosted by The Caterer food and drink magazine.
Having made it to the last stages of the Best Marketing Campaign Award, The Real Food Cafe will have to wait until November 24 to find out whether they’ve beaten five other finalists from across the UK to win the accolade.
The Tyndrum-based eatery is the only Scottish hospitality business in Courier Country to have made it through to the final in any category, with Stonehaven’s The Bay Fish and Chips and several other chefs and businesses in Edinburgh and Glasgow also reaching the finals, including celebrity chef Tom Kitchin.
Having set up the roadside diner 15 years ago, owner Sarah Heward is delighted to have been recognised on the back of their Gluten Free Fortnight campaign in October 2019, the initiative for which they have been nominated.
Sarah said: “These are like the Oscars of the catering world. We got shortlisted to the final for the best marketing campaign award for our gluten-free fortnight campaign in October 2019. I was really proud of that campaign – it was a rip-roaring success.
“Part of the vision statement when I started this company 15 years ago was to create an iconic roadside diner and I guess this is part of that. If I’m really honest, it’s a bit of corporate ego. When you’re the boss of something, it can be quite lonely and obviously nothing beats seeing the place full and happy customers and a successful business – and that’s what you want more than anything else.
“Times have been tough recently and I haven’t seen the place with its normal jumping atmosphere so to get this pat on the back has been really good, just in terms of motivating me and the rest of the team.”
The Cateys are self-nominated awards, meaning that Sarah had to go through a rigorous application process to get her business’s name in front of the judging panel.
She said: “About 30 years ago I was an Acorn Award winner, which is The Caterer’s second-biggest awards after The Cateys and it recognises 30 future starts of the hospitality industry under 30 years old. I was one of the first ever award winners when they launched that and so I’ve had some experience of winning something from The Caterer – which is about as major league as it gets in the catering industry. This is the blue ribbon of the catering industry and I’m so pleased we’ve been shortlisted.”
The Real Food Cafe is popular among locals with a gluten intolerance or coeliac disease and Sarah’s campaign, which ran from October 13-27 last year, helped not only put the diner on the map, but it also brought more attention to local producers.
“There were a few things that I think made our marketing campaign stand out. It was the power of successful collaboration – when you’re a small independent business, which we are at the end of the day, you really don’t have much of a marketing budget if any.
“So to team up and work with Coeliac UK and the likes of Kerry Foods, a multi-billion pound food company, and Green City Wholefoods in Glasgow, was us exponentially leveraging up. It’s stuff that I couldn’t afford. We pay to be members of Coeliac UK and to have our accreditation every year and they send an auditor to audit us but we really wanted to maximise our membership and they were really happy to help us do that with our Gluten Free Fortnight campaign.
“They helped us promote it to their 60,000 members. Golden Sheaf, owned by Kerry Foods, who make the gluten-free batter that we use were also great and provided us with some stock to help finance it.
“Green City helped us reach other suppliers – if people wanted us to feature their gluten-free snack foods, they would supply them to Green City, who would then supply them to us, so that we could provide tastings and sampling events. They also helped supply us with some other goodies that we put together in a hamper as a prize.
“Obviously we wanted to run it again this year but we’re just not ready, but we aim to run it again next year.”
Created from a derelict Little Chef diner, The Real Food Cafe was Sarah’s homage to her cousin who suffered from coeliac, while also her nod to Perthshire’s thriving tourist community.
She said: “We created The Real Food Cafe from a derelict former Little Chef. What I wanted to do was create an iconic roadside diner that was very invested in the community, which included buying goods and services as locally as possible. But, when I say community, I also mean the community of the travelling public.
“From the very early days we’ve wanted to include families on holiday, but we’ve also targeted runners, walkers, mountain-bikers, West Highland Way walkers and motorcyclists. We wanted to create an environment where all these people from different walks of life could rest, have a bite to eat, and have some R&R while on their journeys.
“Way before anyone really knew what coeliac was, it was pretty awful for people with it as they really had nowhere to go, particularly in our remote little corner of the world. I think I started including gluten-free batter 14 years ago, before you could even really buy it commercially because a cousin of mine had coeliac disease. I knew about it because my mum would go to a lot of trouble to send them food parcels. So I wanted to include them in this broad reach I wanted the diner to have.
“It’s down-to-earth, no frills, informal, reasonably-priced fast food favourites which are done really well. Everything is homemade or locally sourced. That’s where it all started from and the basis we’ve built the cafe on.”
