HELLO, THIS IS US!

SUP Foods Mobile Coffee Shops were created by us, Parm and Fran, with huge excitement from our daughter, Lillamina, who has assumed the role chief taste tester of snacks!

The idea for SUP Foods started whilst at a food industry event where we were lucky enough to speak with a number of start-up food and drink businesses who create delicious products. These conversations were eye opening for us; the sheer number of small businesses needing an extra helping hand to stay afloat was incredibly high. Although diverse in the products that they made, each small business had the same worry - cashflow.

We created SUP with the aim of supporting as many small brands as possible; we buy from them at fair prices, we pay them efficiently and we take their products and their stories to our customers to drive their brand awareness.

Man and woman standing infront of coffee cart

Maidenbower Infant School and the pod.png

So why a coffee shop? Mainly because we like to talk and we tend to talk most when we have a hot drink in our hands. We believe that we can spread the word of our wonderful suppliers more by being a coffee shop, rather than if we were any other type of food shop.

We were happy to be supporting our suppliers and started to wonder who else we could support. We started to volunteer with our local residents association, from attending events and donating a percentage of our sales back, to supporting on the day with set up, clean up and packing away.

With our daughter being in primary school, we soon became aware of the funding situation that many of our schools are in, with some teachers using their own money to buy in essentials - like paper! This is why we went on to create the SUP School Project...

The SUP School Project is a fundraising project to help local primary schools raise much needed, additional funds, supporting our children's futures.

SUP SCHOOL PROJECT

For many public schools in the UK, money is tight and often compromises are having to be made on the resources our children have access to. After attending a talk at our daughters school by headteacher, Mrs Roberts, it was clear that, although a great job was being done with the budget available, additional fundraising was crucial.

We met with Mrs Roberts soon after the talk and suggested that we take one of our trailers to school once a week and then donate 10% of sales directly back to the school - as simple as that. We trialed this for four weeks initially and raised over £80 for the school in that time. The school and us deemed this to be a success and started to work up a plan of how we could maximise the opportunity further. We now attend as many school events as possible, including parents evenings, and take our trailer to the school twice a week.

Based on the success at Maidenbower Infant School, we approached Lingfield Primary School to see if they would be interested in joining the project. Both Mrs Pupplett (headteacher) and Mrs Sutton (deputy head) were thrilled to join and we started the same process with our second school.