Spotlight: The Fields Beneath
How a Kentish Town cafe beneath a railway station makes vegan food easy, convenient and delicious for hundreds a day.
How this Kentish Town cafe is making it easy to be vegan. They will also be offering office catering soon!
Gavin Fernback started working in cafes and pubs in 2010. He loved the interactions amongst customers and between customers and teams. In fact, he loved it so much he decided to start his own coffee cart. But, after losing his pitch 6 months into the venture, he opened The Fields Beneath. We had a chat with Gavin to find out how he runs the business and his growth plans.
We are very small, but create some of the most interesting and varied counter food in London. Off the high street but beneath a railway station, we serve hundreds every day and most recently, a year ago we dropped all animal products from our menu.
What is the most important point to get right in your business?
Creating an environment that stimulates and excites your team, and still makes money. Treating the team like a family and caring for them beyond the expectations of the job role. Achieving this takes communication, over and above the comfort zone of chit chat.
The same applies to customers — we try to go beyond the weather and have great conversations with people. We can really make a difference, if we go beyond the small talk!
We’re under a railway arch next to a train station — someone once said she’d lived across the road for 6 months and hasn’t yet been in, as she assumed as we were a station cafe, we would be shit! Lol.
How do you source your products?
We source our coffees through a handful of importers we trust, who themselves work directly with farms and co-ops, developing the coffee regions of those countries too.
When it comes to food ingredients, becoming vegan has made us more conscious of sourcing, but certainly no easier to source responsibly. Whilst we can ethically source chocolates and breads, with traceability of the cacao and flour mill, we’re still buying commodity grains, oils, sugars and so on, and most our vegetables will have been grown abroad.
I’d like to aim towards becoming a seasonal business — so you’d only ever see a tomato on our counter a few weeks of the year. This would be a whole other conversation about sustainability though — I’ve quite strong opinions about it!
You are focused on making veganism normal (easy, convenient and delicious). How do you go about it?
To start with, through bribery! We offered all our customers a deal they couldn’t resist, to transition their milky coffees to dairy free ones. Having Oalty helped a huge deal, as it was so close in taste and consistency to cow’s milk. Combine that with the great menus our food team have been coming up with, and it’s a no-brainer. We still serve delicious food and drink, so at least when in Kentish Town, it’s easy to be vegan.
What are your most popular products?
Banana bread, and our filled croissants. And coffee of course!
What brings most customers to you?
Instagram is great, particularly when we went vegan — within a fortnight we went from 700 to 7000 followers.
Google is also hugely useful — we recently got the 360 streetview done for inside the cafe which should give people a better idea of what we’re like to visit and hopefully, draw more people in.
Biggest technology trend to watch?
I can’t wait to go cashless — in London it just makes sense — the slowest part of any transaction is the cash. There are a few very regular customers who are Luddite about the whole contactless thing, but sooner or later, cash will be dead in day to day life in London. Bring it on!
Biggest business challenge for you in 2018?
Growth — we’ve just built a prep kitchen and are looking to open another two sites by the end of 2018. So new staffing, making sure our systems and processes are bullet-proof and making sure we make a profit along the way.
We’ll be offering office catering soon, so if you want a damn fine lunch delivered for a big meeting, let us know!
Why Shopwave?
Front end product editing — our menu changes a lot and the team are fairly autonomous, so to have some control over the functionality of the till, live in the shop, is very handy. There’s no dependence on the back office to fix things. So we use the back office purely for reporting. We have found Shopwave pretty bloody simple to use and intuitive.
What is your day like?
I live outside London so get up at 4:30 to open the shop, and try to get home before 6. When we’re between staff or have new staff, a lot of time is spent in the shop working shifts and training. When the team is established and confident I can spend my time working on our systems in preparation for the new shops.
My major activities are working on new business (catering, events, festivals we’re getting ready for this Summer) and buying new equipment for our new kitchen. Opening new shops and this kitchen will keep me busy until the end of the year I think!
After work I like to run, to forage, and to watch tv with my wife and our cats.
The Fields Beneath
52A Prince of Wales Road
London — NW5 3LN