Create: Hitting The Festive Season 'Head On' With Lolly’s Support

Leading event caterer focuses on the day job

About Create 

Create Foods has been one of London's leading event caterers - delivering innovative, delicious and beautifully presented food, bespoke to every client's requirements.

Create's menu philosophy gives priority to carefully sourced ‘best of British’ seasonal ingredients. The company is widely regarded for being 'reliable, consistent, trustworthy and professional by clients and venues'.

The festive period presents - without doubt - the busiest time of year for Create. As Blake Henderson, operations director, explains: 

"November and December we will manage more than 150 events, 60,000 covers withlots of pop-up bars - spanning across a six-week period. Our feet don't touch the ground."

Working with Lolly (Lolly Smart)

Prior to working with Lolly, the team at Create took their own tills and printers to the events - to support the pop-up bars. These tills didn't provide back-office functionality or reporting, but enabled operators to take payments only. 

Following the CH&Co and Concerto Group merger, Create leased twenty three Lolly Smart tills. Blake Henderson adds: 

"For some events, we knew we would need up to five tills operating at the same venue. Therefore it was important we had access to the systems well in advance of the season.- to ensure we could cover off every single event as professionally as possible. 

"I was also keen to ensure we would have back-office reporting functionality, so I could see how well we performed at the various events - especially charity events."

Support levels - The Lolly Smart

The Lolly Smart provides a compact touchscreen till that has its own inbuilt receiptprinter so it doesn’t take up a lot of counter space. It also has an inbuilt battery which is useful for portability, or if an electric supply fails - you can continue trading for up to seven hours.

The till comes with an SD card which acts as a secure back-up. And it is installed with Lolly EPoS software, which is super intuitive and easy to use. It is matched with a range of add-ons such as portable card machine, bar code scanner, cash drawer, additional printer, a card scanner, and LollyHQ cloud back office.

Blake Henderson: "What we have found extremely useful is having the ability to adapt the tills to suit the upcoming event in question; we can programme them. 

"And the tills from Lolly really support speed of service, because they are intuitive and easy-to-use. The operators can easily jump on and off them, turning orders around as quickly as possible. No more clunky keys, making it difficult to input the relevant data.

"We have also been hugely impressed by the support levels at Lolly. The service they provide is personalised and bespoke to Create. We are made to feel like important clients, and our queries are answered very quickly every time."

Peter Moore, CEO at Lolly, adds: "The back-office functionality that the Create team has access to allows them to see live reports on how well a particular bar or till is performing, as well as stock levels. This type of reporting has become all-important for today's busy hospitality provider."