Lindley Venue Catering signs £4.3m deal with Kent Cricket

The five-year, £4.3 million contract with Kent comes only weeks after Lindley signed a catering contract with Gloucestershire and extended its existing contract with Essex for the 2012 season. As well as being brought on board to manage and develop all of the match day catering at Kent Cricket's main St Lawrence ground in Canterbury, the company will also operate matches at the club's County Ground in Beckenham and The Nevill Ground at Tunbridge Wells. Lindley will be employing a dedicated sales coordinator who will be based at the St Lawrence Ground, and is also investing £40,000 to develop on-site food retail offer and extend the catering facilities in the Club Members' area. The caterer is also planning to introduce bespoke catering to match the different requirements of visitors attending County and CB40 matches, and FPt20games. The Lindley team will take control of catering and events for Kent Cricket in partnership with the club's in-house catering and events management team, which until now has been solely responsible for managing the match day and other hospitality services. Jamie Clifford, Kent Cricket chief executive said: "We have ambitious plans to increase the use of the club's facilities in general, and St Lawrence Ground, Canterbury, in particular, where we have recently undertaken an extensive refurbishment programme which has included the creation of state-of-the art conference and banqueting suites. "Our in-house catering and events team has done a fantastic job in establishing a great reputation for the quality of the club's catering and hospitality, and it's because of their success that we have reached the stage where we now need to increase the resource to manage the incremental business which they are generating. Adam Elliott, chief executive of Lindley said: "Having worked with other sporting venues on optimising their websites, we have achieved increases of up to 20% in conference and banqueting sales, so we know the results which we can achieve. "We also aim to maximise revenue from match day catering by fine tuning the food offering for different types of event."