Pelican was awarded the contract to manage the club’s food-related purchasing for its Riverside Stadium facilities and its Rockliffe Park training ground, which includes overseeing supplier tendering, product sourcing, pricing negotiations to centralising supplier invoicing and payments.
Specific categories are being reviewed as part of the contract, including fruit and vegetables, food wholesale, fresh seafood, confectionery and beverages. Pelican has already achieved a 10% saving for the club’s food wholesale category via a supplier retendering process.
Mark Ellis, chief operating officer for Middlesbrough FC, said: “As a club, we host on average 25 football games per year, which brings crowds of around 16,000 on the concourses, in addition to serving around 700 meals in the hospitality areas. We also host a range of conferences, banquets, weddings and other events.
“Our chefs are responsible for creating menus for the varying events, however I felt it was time to bring in a procurement specialist to help not only reduce our food costs, but decrease the time our chefs spend on purchasing and administration.”
Ellis said that Pelican had been selected for a number of reasons, for example, cost savings were clear and the club was aiming to save at least 12% across all its food purchases over the next 12 months. In addition, from its chefs’ perspective, they trusted Pelican to deliver the products they want, when they want.
As part of the partnership, Middlesbrough FC is adopting Pelican’s Purchasing Intelligence (Pi) online portal, which is a cloud-based procurement solution that is designed to provide complete visibility, management and control over purchasing spend, budgets, stock valuation and supplier invoices.