An Allegro range dedicated to snack items can bring in up to £300 a day for Marco’s Fish & Chips in Ayr

Marco’s Fish & Chips is a busy shop, about half a mile from the coast, and regularly serves customers queuing out the door. The business gets through around 100 bags of potatoes a week, rising to as many as 155 in a particularly busy week. With no deliveries or click and collect, the focus is firmly on serving customers in the shop.

When owner Marco Luni extended into the premises next door, he installed a two pan Allegro wall range specifically to cater for gluten free food. A great addition to his four pan Kiremko, its compact footprint made the Allegro ideal for the smaller space, where it sits neatly beneath a canopy. However, when the idea failed to take off, Marco began looking for another way to make the extra space pay.

The answer was to use the Allegro as a dedicated frying range for snack items, allowing him to add 12 new products without putting extra pressure on the main shop. The menu now includes salt and chilli chicken, mozzarella sticks, mac and cheese bites, spicy chicken strips, chicken popcorn, chicken goujons and fish fingers, which he buys from Henry Colbeck.

Marco comments: “I thought, if I can get as many extra items onto the menu as I can make money from, without it actually feeling like any extra work, that makes sense. All we’re doing is putting the frozen food into the basket and frying it, so I don’t need to hire anyone, the current staff can do it.”

An extra £200-£300 a day

The additional items, priced between £4 and £5.75, have become an important source of extra revenue, with Marco estimating a mark up of almost 200% on some products and around 150% on the chicken items. Marco adds: “We get a lot of people ordering two fish suppers who then come back to the till and say, “add in a portion of this for me,’ and they eat it while they are waiting. We can take an extra £200-£300 just in one day. It makes a big difference at the end of the year.”

The two pan Allegro also keeps breadcrumbs and other frozen products out of the four main pans in the shop, helping to keep the oil in those pans cleaner.

For Marco, choosing an Allegro was never in doubt. His main shop already has a four pan Kiremko frying range, which he describes as “the best on the market”, and the Allegro gave him the same confidence in the additional space.

“If you go for the best then you don’t have any problems,” he says. “As with my Kiremko, the recovery times on the Allegro are so quick. You can put a basket of chicken in, lift it and put another item straight in and you don’t have to wait for the oil to come back up to temperature, it’s there already.”

Essentially, that speed means Marco’s can handle more volume without adding staff. And the extra revenue he’s making means he can invest in those staff. He explains: “The extra revenue makes a big difference because it means I can give my staff a bigger wage increase. I always feel that your staff are the most important part of the business, and we get a lot of praise from customers who say we have the best staff.”

Marco’s relationship with KFE and the reliability of its equipment were also reasons for buying from them again. He explains: “The first time I dealt with KFE, they were excellent, so that’s why I dealt with them again. And my four pan Kiremko is doing the same output it did when I first bought it 15 years ago. When we’re doing the volume we do, we need something reliable, because even being closed for one day, it’s a big loss for us.

Get in touch to see how we can help your business grow on 01778 380 448 or e-mail sales@kfeltd.co.uk