The Old Boatshed is a beach caf on the north coast of Cornwall, a very popular holiday location at the farthest tip of Britains South

The Old Boatshed is a beach café on the north coast of Cornwall, a very popular holiday location at the farthest tip of Britain’s South West peninsula. It’s run by husband and wifeteam David and Morwenna Rowe, who, as the name would suggest, converted an old boatshed into an eatery in 2010 and built an award-winning business – it has won Taste of the West awards every year from 2015 until 2019.

The café is located at Huer’s Cove, a popular surfing beach served by a large National Trust car park. The Rowes built their reputation locally by serving hearty breakfasts to regular surfers after they came out of the sea. They installed a rack for surfboards outside and didn’t mind if customers came in wearing only a DryRobe, or even just a wetsuit. This pragmatic, laid-back attitude helped set the relaxed tone for their café, where anyone was welcome and the serving staff were friendly and informal. They were also one of the first eateries in the region to welcome dogs.

The Old Boatshed sells Origin Coffee, a well-respected brand roasted in Cornwall. Naturally, they use all local ingredients in their food but, where possible, they only use small, artisanal suppliers, a policy which helped them develop a good reputation locally for supporting high quality small suppliers. They produce some of the best breakfasts in the South West, and expanded into offering tasty lunchtime snacks and hearty, well-cooked evening meals. In the summer, they specialise in barbecue ‘feasts’ which they cook on the beach using a signature secret marinade for their meat, a key part of the proposition – they market the feasts through their websites and tickets sell out within an hour of them going on sale.

Cornwall

Cornwall is very popular with British tourists based in southern England, especially relatively well-off visitors from London and the South East. Visitor numbers grew substantially at the turn of the 21st century, fuelled by the opening of the Eden Project, Tate St. Ives and National Maritime Museum, Falmouth, as well as the popularity of the TV chef Rick Stein and his Padstow restaurant, which was the catalyst for Cornwall’s reputation as a region with excellent food. Cornwall is also popular with German tourists, due to a series of Sunday-evening dramas shown on German television based on Rosamund Pilcher novels. Other European tourists, such as from France, The Netherlands and Belgium, are drawn to the impressive gardens in the region, the result of a mild climate produced by the warm sea currents of the Gulf Stream.

According to the Office for National Statistics, Cornwall has a resident population of only around 500,000 people (Cornwall Council, 2018), and so the influx of tourists that flock to the county between Easter and Hallowe’en is of high economic importance to the county. It is also one of the areas with high social and economic deprivation in Europe (Smallcombe, 2017).

Recent History

Naturally, The Old Boatshed is a seasonal business, which has generally done very well in the summer. In the early days, as its reputation grew locally, tourists from London and the South East began to discover it, and in response, the Rowes began to cater specifically for them – and their wallets! Prices gradually crept up over time. Londoners who visited the café on holiday talked about it in their social circles back home. The Old Boatshed began to get reviewed in national newspapers, always positively. The Rowes saw some coverage in German newspapers too.

However, whilst Cornish business organizations celebrated the café as an example of a local brand that has successfully grown and achieved widespread recognition, it received some negative publicity on social media, with some local people accusing the Rowes of ‘selling out’ and only catering for rich Londoners.

Just before the Covid-19 pandemic hit, the Rowes realized that they had lost many of their local customers, and the winter season of 2019 was one of the worst they had experienced up to that point. Surfers would still use the café in the mornings, but as the prices rose, they spent less – for example, trading a ‘full Cornish’ cooked breakfast for a cheaper bacon roll. They asked a few local residents why they no longer used the café and were told they didn’t think The Old Boatshed was “meant for them” any more. A food truck has recently begun trading in the National Trust car park, undercutting The Old Boatshed during breakfast and lunchtime, and many beachgoers, especially locals, have started using it instead.

When the Covid-19 pandemic took hold in spring 2020, the Rowes were able to make use of the UK government’s furlough scheme to keep staff employed, as well as fall back on cash reserves built up over the summer of 2019, although they were already rather depleted after the winter season. They did provide a takeaway service, but with their main audience (tourists) locked down at home, it only made a limited contribution to the business.

The summer of 2021 proved to be difficult. Whilst more people than ever visited Cornwall during the summer – some 30,000 more than usually expected, according to Visit Cornwall (Gladwell, 2021) - The Old Boatshed was struggling with supply issues and staffing problems. Partington (2021) described how issues as diverse as climate change, Britain’s changing relationship with the European Union and the effects of the pandemic impacted the delivery of coffee in the UK by the autumn of 2021. Whilst the Rowes did the cooking themselves, the Old Boatyard had always used young, local workers, with other vacancies fulfilled by casual labour from other European countries. They also found that the trend towards customers reserving tables at several restaurants and selecting the one they wanted to go to on the day, letting the other businesses down, affected them this summer (Scotter, 2021).

Current Situation

As Covid-19 restrictions ease, Morwenna and David are keen to rethink their business model. Whilst the summer of 2021 was very busy, they weren’t able to take full-advantage of the increase in tourists due to staff shortages; they closed on Mondays and Tuesdays, and wait-times for tables the rest of the week were too long, so their service standards were lower than they would have liked. Staff from Europe didn’t come to the area to work this summer because of Brexit issues and local workers moved into other industries, having seen how vulnerable service industry jobs were during the pandemic.The Rowes also suspect that, as overseas holiday destinations re-open to British tourists, visitors to Cornwall may well decrease in the near future.

As the Rowes are conscious that the pandemic revealed the vulnerabilities of service businesses in the tourism industry, they are keen to diversify. They don’t want to ‘put their eggs in one basket’, as the old British saying goes, and wish to identify some other, more robust income streams, building on their business strengths. From publicity and private emailsthey’ve received, the Rowes believe that they may have some influential supporters in useful companies in London and Berlin, such as publishing houses.

There are several markets they need to consider when adapting their business to be more resilient. Mintel (2021) reports that in July 2021, 59% of UK adults ordered takeaway food, and even more (64%) ate out in a restaurant, so the Rowes don’t necessarily want to move away from their core business. However, due to the pandemic, young people are less keen to work in such a vulnerable sector as food service, and due to Brexit restrictions, the Rowes have not been able to fill vacancies using labour from Europe, and they’re not sure how this could be addressed in the short term. They have heard, however, that digital technology has developed to a point where they could take advantage of new platforms to reach customers anywhere in the world. The café itself has a reasonable social media presence, mainly on Facebook, which they mainly use for posting menus, though the Rowes have developed some encouraging follower numbers on Twitter and Instagram.

The Rowes have tried to write some brand values for the business, and they’ve landed on ‘Quality’, ‘Expertise’, ‘Convivial’, ‘Irresistible’, ‘Sustainable’ and ‘Everywhere’.

They would like you to suggest a diversified plan for the future of their business, clearly justified. It should include an audit of the current situation, using relevant academic models to structure the analysis and give them confidence in your evaluation. They would like a clear sense of who their customers are and who they should target to grow their business. They believe that they are “bigger than Cornwall” but are conscious that they don’t want to alienate local people.

question1: Select one theory/framework/concept and Assess its strengths and limitations for strategic marketing planning in the context of the Old Boatshed case study.