Ones to watch: How Kanpla is shaking up workplace dining

A changing landscape

The B&I contract catering market has evolved hugely over the last decade. People increasingly recognise the benefits that great food can bring to the workplace: fuelling productivity, increasing employee satisfaction, and helping to create a sense of community. Alongside this, people’s expectations have changed: more and more customers want to know what’s in their food and where it comes from, and they now expect an experience that combines great tech and seamless service.

Workplace dining habits were already shifting pre-pandemic. Employees were looking for greater flexibility in terms of when and where they ate; grazing at different times of the day, wanting to grab and go, and expecting an offering akin to the high street. The pandemic shifted this further, creating a world of hybrid working that has had a significant impact on the frequency people go to the office as well as their interactions when they are there.

What does this mean for B&I caterers?

With the workplace in a state of flux, B&I caterers now play a crucial role in helping clients create workplaces that work in this new world, and that will attract the new and next generation of employees.

The opportunities are there, and caterers are looking for smart partners who can help deliver such solutions: that’s where Kanpla comes in.

The brainchild of three high school students from Denmark – Peter Bæch, Jonas Gøttler and Robert Wolf - Kanpla was created to bring contract catering into the digital age.

As students, this trio saw big flaws in the catering provision at their school with unnecessary queues, too much waste, and a lack of digitalisation both front and back of house.

At the same time, they understood the magnitude of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals and wanted to create a solution that was rooted in a clear sense of purpose whilst meeting the needs of the future workplace. So that’s what they did.

Launched in 2020, Kanpla gained attention from investors when the young Kanpla team got to the finals of the National Danish Innovation Awards. Having gone through the competition, refining their proposition and business model, smart investors such as henQ (a Dutch VC), Kræn Østergård Nielsen (CEO at Coop), as well as the founders of Clio (the largest digital educational publishing company in Denmark), quickly saw the potential of this new start-up, providing the seed funding required to turn this business proposition into a reality.

Seeing the opportunities for growth, an advisory board was created, enabling Kanpla to bring together brilliant new talent in the tech, design and creative space with the wisdom of food delivery and foodservice experts.

What is Kanpla?

Kanpla is a digital platform that makes things better and simpler for operations teams, improves service levels, and drives customer engagement and loyalty.

Whether you’re a chef looking for a smarter way to manage menu planning and meeting catering, to an operations manager that needs to save costs, reduce food waste, and cut queues, Kanpla provides a seamless digital user journey for catering teams.

Beyond driving efficiencies, Kanpla is also an app focused on customer engagement, personalisation, and loyalty. Simple and intuitive, Kanpla allows customers to pre-order food and drink, or scan and go on the day. It gathers insights on customer spend and footfall, provides push notifications about the latest specials or seasonal promotions, and incorporates tailored rewards so that adoption and usage of the app remains high, sales increase, and happy customers keep coming back time and time again.

Yet, as important as convenience is to B&I customers, Kanpla understands that people care about so much more, so they’ve created a platform that bridges the gap between customers and catering operations. With Kanpla, people can see the efforts being made to provide great food, support their health and wellbeing and protect the planet; forging a greater sense of connection between employees and their workplace and retaining that hard-won customer loyalty.

An entrepreneurial success story

Three years on, Kanpla’s growth is remarkable. Now, the leading contract catering app in Denmark, Kanpla is working with some of the countries leading employers such as Maersk and Danfoss and foodservice providers such as SERWIZ and Coor.

The founders of Kanpla, Peter and Jonas, are probably the youngest Danes ever to raise over €2M. At just 21 years old, they and the company's third founder, Robert Wolf (24), have now set their sights on the Netherlands, Norway, and the UK with the goal of becoming the world's leading digital contract catering platform.

Operating across more than 1,000 sites and with a team of 28, the results being delivered to clients are equally impressive. Multiple hours a week have been saved on administration by kitchen teams, customer satisfaction with the app is at 96%, and adoption rates of the app in client sites are on average 92% after month one, with a clear plan in place to maintain engagement.

On top of this, on average, around 65-70% of customers have push notifications enabled in the app, and multiple partners have now succeeded in going from physical sales to 100% app-based ordering.

With new UK clients already under their belt, the future is certainly promising for Kanpla as its digital solutions continue to make operations simpler and better, and clients and customers happier; helping to create a workplace dining experience that is second to none.

For more information about Kanpla visit www.kanpla.io