The Perch Café – Trinity College Dublin
Successfully securing our first Trinity College Dublin outlet in September 2018, The Perch Café has grown from strength to strength with an annual turnover of €700,000 Located in the ground floor of the Arts building, our 5 day a week operation at The Perch Café sees us serving a range of morning, lunch and afternoon snacks complemented by our own Fairtrade coffee offer Aspretto in a bustling student hub.
Successfully securing our first Trinity College Dublin outlet in September 2018, The Perch Café has grown from strength to strength with an annual turnover of €700,000 Located in the ground floor of the Arts building, our 5 day a week operation at The Perch Café sees us serving a range of morning, lunch and afternoon snacks complemented by our own Fairtrade coffee offer Aspretto in a bustling student hub.
Keen to create a sense of brand loyalty and build a community with our customers at Trinity College Dublin our Student Experience Manager, Jamie has developed a number of engagement campaigns that centre around two way communication; requesting feedback, responding to customer suggestions and running promotions with the outcome of creating a community within the university and specifically The Perch Café.
Our regularly maintained website www.theperchcafe.ie offers information on our latest menu updates, opening hours and recent posts from our blog. Staying connected with our millennial and Gen Z customers is important to us and through our social media platforms @ThePerchCafe on Facebook and Twitter, we can connect with our guests, share our good news stories and publicise our competitions all of which form part of our marketing strategy to build our online community engagement.
Our engagement strategy goes beyond the digital element as we understand the importance of visibility across campus. To support this we have in-house posters and to communicate our food offer, loyalty cards to encourage returning customers and work closely with Trinity College Dublin to share our promotions with their Student Ambassadors where we can fully tap into the growing student community.
We understand that sustainability is hugely important to staff and students at Trinity College Dublin and similarly within Sodexo, we believe we have a responsibility to reduce our carbon footprint and environmental impact. Mentioned earlier, our blog posts do well to promote our activities among our customers where recently we discussed our partnership with TCD Plastic Solutions.
Working together with TCD Plastic Solutions we committed to a 40c discount on hot beverages where customers provided their own reusable cup. Similarly we’ve introduced a number of initiatives that are in line with the progressive, environmentally conscious cohort of students and staff at TCD;
Plant starch cutlery – Moving away from plastic cutlery, the plant starch material from our alternative cutlery is made largely from renewable plants reducing our consumption of single use plastics
Compostable cups - We have replaced all coffee cups with fully biodegradable disposable alternatives fully branded with our Fairtrade Aspretto logo
Paper straws - Joining the movement away from plastic straws The Perch Café offer paper or plant starch alternatives
Zero landfill – None of the waste generated at our café is sent to landfill instead, we send our waste to be converted to electricity for 80,000 homes in Ireland.