Our ‘Coffee With’ series allows us to share the deep expertise of our members, get to know them on a personal level, and encourage more collaboration within the commercial catering industry.
In this instalment, we speak to Bill Perry, Head of Regional Sales at Welbilt UK, to find out how the company helps its end users, his predictions for the future, and much more.
Can you start by describing your career to date and explaining how you made a foray into the commercial catering industry?
I entered the industry back in January 2015. I was 19, and it was one of my first jobs.
I joined a company called PKL Group, based in Bishops Cleve, Cheltenham, as a business development executive for its events division. My role involved hiring commercial catering equipment out for festivals and big events like Wimbledon.
I was there for seven years, working my way up to Head of Business Development for the UK and Europe for PKL’s delivery kitchen division. This promotion coincided with the COVID pandemic and explosion of the delivery kitchen market, and we worked with the likes of Deliveroo, DoorDash & Karma Kitchen.
Once I’d been exposed to the startup world and knew what it was like to work for a smaller company still trying to figure out its product-market fit, I decided to transition to working for that type of company.
Initially, I joined Peckwater Brands, a virtual brand company. It builds restaurant brands that only exist in the delivery apps and then licenses those brands to existing restaurant operators to operate them completely virtually. I worked in the partnerships team, which was a great experience.
I then joined a food wholesaler called Collectiv Food, which had a really interesting last-mile delivery model.
However, an opportunity came up with Welbilt, a company I knew well having worked with its brands as a distributor. I knew it was the perfect role for me, as I wanted to go from distribution into manufacturing, so I jumped at the opportunity.
I started with Welbilt in September 2023 as a key account manager.
In September 2024, I took over as head of regional sales for the UK, looking after our distribution and dealer network.
What responsibilities does your current role entail?
I’m responsible for managing our distribution channel.
We have long-standing relationships with our distributors and dealers up and down the country. I manage a team of five that looks after those relationships, with each team member responsible for a different region of the country.
I’m also responsible for setting up the commercial strategy, setting our product strategy for any new launches, and making sure we’re doing the appropriate end-user prospecting and development.
There’s a big emphasis on follow-up and after-sales support, too, so my role covers the full sales cycle.
How have you seen the industry evolve over the last ten years?
The first thing you notice as a consumer is that the amount of choice has exploded in the last ten years or so.
The quality of food offers that we have now in the UK—on almost any high street in the country—is so advanced from what we had ten years ago.
You might still have those quick-service restaurants (QSR) that are geared towards grab-and-go, but the quality of the food they’re putting out these days is of a much, much higher standard. That’s because the consumer choice has expanded so much that restaurants have had to up their game to compete for that market share.
There have been some interesting shifts on the industry side, too. For example, the dark kitchen model really started around ten years ago. Deliveroo and Just Eat began operating in a significant way at that time. It’s a model that lots of other people have adopted here in the UK, but also internationally.
What kind of company is Welbilt, and how does it help its customers?
Welbilt is one of the world’s leading manufacturers of food service equipment.
We manufacture brands for almost every single area of a commercial kitchen, from refrigeration and warewashing to ovens and fryers. Whatever it might be, Welbilt has a solution.
We deliver value to customers by manufacturing premium products that not only simplify the processes in the kitchen but also help to reduce your energy bills, energy consumption, and overall cost base.
Welbilt has worked with some of the largest brands in the world for almost 100 years now, having been founded back in 1929.
This means we can deliver a solid commercial kitchen infrastructure and, most importantly, we know what good looks like and can help our customers realise that.
Which aspects of working for Welbilt do you most enjoy?
It’s fantastic to be a part of the huge change we’ve gone through and our recent product launches.
FitKitchen is a perfect example—it was only launched last September, and it’s already delivering huge success for us.
We’ve also launched a range of new brands that have opened opportunities we may not have previously been able to take advantage of.
But the thing I find most satisfying is being able to work with some of our key distributors and dealers. Working with those key partners to deliver high-quality solutions to end users, overseeing that process from start to finish, and then delivering the after-sales and customer support is hugely rewarding on a personal level.
Welbilt works on rollouts with end users that involve developing their menu and proving that the oven can work for the menu.
We do live trials; those trials go successfully, and then we do big rollouts at scale, which are always satisfying. We’ve done a few of those this year, and they’ve all gone well.
I’ve enjoyed this element of working for Welbilt from the moment I joined the business, and I still enjoy it today.
On the subject of distributors—how do you find working with other ENSE members, and what can you reveal about your relationships with them?
ENSE is an incredibly important part of our business and strategy going forward.
Many of our strategic partners in the country are part of ENSE. There are a lot of high-calibre, high-quality distributors and suppliers in this buying group.
I always enjoy the mutual collaboration, especially at the annual ENSE Partnership Summit & Awards.
It’s a fantastic event to attend that allows us to sit down with the country’s leading distributors, some of whom we might not have seen for many months.
It’s also a great opportunity to touch base with other suppliers, see how they’re finding things in the industry, and potentially collaborate with them as well.
ENSE is a brilliant community to be part of, and we value it highly.
What is FitKitchen, and how does it maximise value for Welbilt’s clients?
FitKitchen is what we call ‘a multi-branded partnership’ that delivers expertise to end-user groups.
It’s based on two columns of value.
The first column is our brands, and those are our brands of foodservice equipment within the Welbilt group, such as Convotherm combi ovens and Merrychef high-speed ovens.
The second column is our expertise and experience from working with some of the world’s largest chains and operators.
We take those two value pillars and combine them to bring value directly to end-user groups.
Let’s say you run a coffee shop. You’re all about the concept. You’ve got fantastic coffee beans. You know how to roast them off to get a perfect flavour profile.
You’ve trained up all your baristas, and you’re looking to layer in a food offering—but it’s not your area of expertise.
At Welbilt, we work with some of the world’s largest coffee chains, so we understand what’s required to set up and run a successful food offering within a coffee shop environment.
Using this knowledge, we explain to the end user how to go from ‘food in’ to ‘food out’ through their kitchen. We outline how they can use the different equipment within the kitchen and which equipment is best suited to specific processes.
FitKitchen is all about giving the end user expertise while leveraging the value of the brands within the Ali Group. This allows us to work directly with end users and bring those opportunities back to our distributors and dealers.
For example, an end user might visit one of our development kitchens in Guildford or Sheffield—where we provide full FitKitchen masterclasses—and we’ll run through full concepts with them.
We might demonstrate a full pub menu and explain what the FitKitchen concept looks like in a pub environment. We might explore FitKitchen for a QSR—and again, it’s a QSR menu delivered through our equipment specifically for that market.
The end user can see the value of using this equipment in this environment. We can then establish what their pain points are and work towards providing a tailored solution for them.
We take this opportunity and assign it to a distribution partner that we think is particularly strong in that specific sector and/or in solving the customer’s problem.
So, we do have that end-user relationship, but the primary value for us is in working with the distribution partner to make sure we’re supporting the end user in the right way.
What can you tell me about Merrychef’s products, particularly the conneX range and the Eikon range?
Merrychef is our range of high-speed ovens.
The conneX range is our new range within the Merrychef portfolio. It was launched a couple of years ago, and it’s replaced numerous models from the historical Eikon range.
The Eikon range has been around for a long time and is our most successful range to date. It put Merrychef on the map.
While many of those ovens remain available today, the conneX range has replaced and superseded a couple of them.
The conneX range is different from Eikon in a couple of key ways.
Firstly, the new HD display. It has a seven-inch HD display, which runs the easy touch 2.0 operating system.
That operating system is far easier for an operator to use. It makes it easier to program the ovens, create their own menus, edit live programs, and extract data that they can update.
The second big difference is that the conneX range comes out of the box with kitchen connect capability.
KitchenConnect, our cloud platform, allows customers to connect their ovens to the cloud via WiFi and then allows them to connect to the oven via the WiFi. This connectivity enables them to do things such as menu pushes, downloading analytics, or pulling data out of the oven in whichever way they want to.
Menu pushes are particularly important for the larger chain accounts. We have customers such as Costa that are on KitchenConnect, and their regular menu updates are pushed out via KitchenConnect directly onto the ovens.
The old way of doing menu updates on the Eikon system was that you’d have a USB containing the new menu file. Somebody would have to manually go to every single oven in the estate, plug the USB into the oven, and upload the new menu file from the USB. As you can imagine, within estates such as Costa, this took forever.
So, using KitchenConnect delivers significant value to operators in respect of the sheer number of hours it saves them.
Customers can choose between the conneX® 12 standard power and conneX® 12 high power. The Merrychef conneX® 12 delivers consistent, high-quality food, up to 80% faster than conventional cooking methods.
We also offer the conneX®16, which has the largest cavity to smallest oven width of any high-speed oven on the market.
What about the Convotherm range of combination ovens, particularly ConvoSmoke, ConvoGrill, and ConvoBake?
Convotherm is based in Eglfing, South Germany, and has been around for 50 years at the time of recording.
In that time, it has built a reputation as a premium manufacturer of combi ovens.
It epitomises everything that’s great about German engineering and is a very high-quality product.
In the UK, we have three models within the range.
The maxx pro is the all-singing, all-dancing, top-of-the-range model. It comes with a host of additional options, such as the smoking system, grilling system, and AI system. It’s a premium option, and its price point reflects its range of capabilities.
The max oven is our entry-level oven. It’s an incredibly capable combi oven, but is available at a more ‘value’ price point.
It has the same capabilities as the maxx pro in terms of the cook functions. It still has the crisp and tasty mode, the humidity pro mode, and the baked Pro mode, just at a lower level of capabilities, in that it has three levels compared to the maxx pro’s five.
Then we have our Convotherm mini models, which are the compact ovens. We’ve just launched the mini pro in the UK at the time of recording.
This is the smallest compact combi oven in the marketplace. It’s 49.8 centimetres wide, but it’s a full combi oven. You can actually place two mini pro ovens side by side, and they’ll be almost the same width as a normal combi oven.
It’s also the first of its kind to feature solid-to-liquid cleaning in a compact combi oven format.
We’re already taking orders, so it’s a very exciting time for Convotherm.
What are your commercial catering industry predictions for the next 10 to 20 years?
I think AI will become a far more common in all products.
It might not necessarily be a front-end feature, but it will be somewhere within the product value chain. It might be on the back end, or it might be within the oven looking at service data, or it might assist with remote diagnostics.
I can’t see a world in which AI isn’t in almost every single piece of equipment that has an onboard computer. It just doesn’t make sense for it not to be there because of the value that it delivers.
Another prediction, which is somewhat ‘left field,’ is around robotics.
I think we are almost at a point where robotics is so cheap that it starts to make sense in a commercial kitchen environment.
Around eight years ago, while visiting LA, I visited a company in their product development kitchen. They had a cookline and an extraction canopy above the cookline, and they had a robotic arm on a rail in the extract.
The robotic arm would move along the cook line, up and down, shaking fryers, flipping burgers, taking out baskets of fried food, and tipping it onto hot food displays. It was incredible—I’ve never seen anything like it.
There was still a human at the end of the line putting the food together, building the dish, and sending it out. But the proof of concept was there.
Although the unit economics didn’t make sense for that particular model, the technology did work. Today, the efficiencies are much better now, and that kind of thing will become extremely prevalent within the next 10 to 20 years.
How is Welbilt embracing AI?
Welbilt utilises powerful AI technology in a variety of ways. The most relevant example of this, in relation to our customers, is how AI is deployed within the Convotherm brand.
ConvoSense was launched in 2019 within the Convotherm Maxx Pro range of ovens, providing Optical Cooking in a combi oven for the first time in the industry.
It works by using a camera which is placed at the top of cooking cavity, which watches which food items the operator is loading into the oven, and then the oven loads the appropriate cooking profile for the food item.
It recognises the food, which shelf it’s been out on, and loads up the correct profile so that you get a perfect result every single time. All the operator needs to do is load the food and close the door!
Since it was launched in 2019, ConvoSense has been deployed in 2,000 kitchens. It improves consistency, reduces energy consumption, and reduces waste, so it really does deliver huge value to operators and customers alike.
What are your interests outside of commercial catering?
I’m a massive Arsenal fan. I live and die by how well Arsenal performed at the weekend!
All of my family are from Highbury and used to live just outside the stadium. Although I grew up in the southwest, I was born in Hackney.
I’m a Londoner at heart, and every weekend, without fail, I watch the Arsenal game on the box. I don’t go to enough games. I would love to go to more, but I now have a young family, so time pressures never really allow.
I’ve been married for a couple of years, and we have a baby boy who’s five months old at the time of recording.
It’s been both a crazy experience and the adventure of a lifetime becoming a parent.
He’s a bundle of joy and so enjoyable to be around—very smiley and giggly. He’s just started sleeping, too, which is a bonus!
Since the title of this series is ‘A Coffee With,’ do you have a favourite type of coffee, and if so, what is it?
My wife and I love the taste of instant coffee.
I know this is a rather dull selection, but I don’t think anything beats a strong, black instant coffee that wakes you up in the morning. This is my go-to choice.
If I’m getting a coffee out in a fancy establishment, I’ll go for a flat white. But, at home, it’s instant coffee all day, every day.
Thank you to Bill for his insights.
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