George Leung is well-known to gourmets dining at his Cheshire restaurants – and to specialist and premium food buyers in the big supermarket chains for whom he has created dishes and sauces. He has now launched the first ever oriental take-away food franchise to be offered in Britain and it’s looking like a tasty business opportunity.
It’s called Wok2go, and the menu is restaurant-standard food created for take-away by George Leung.
There are currently three Wok2go stores in the North West – and the concept is proving so strong and sustainable that a further 15 have been snapped up in just 12 weeks by franchisees across the country. “The oriental food market is worth more than £1bn in Britain and it is growing,” says George. “But it is a market which is fragmented amongst thousands of businesses – and there is no high-quality oriental food chain or franchise in the country.
“This is potentially a huge opportunity – and you don’t have to be Chinese to own or run a franchise,” he adds. “Wok2go is a franchise that can be mastered and managed by anybody, including franchisees with no retail or food industry experience. We offer franchisees intense four-week training programmes, supervised by myself, where they gather all the necessary skills to run an exciting and successful business. The key is that the Wok2go concept provides customers with a consistently high-quality, healthy-eating menu in which only the freshest ingredients at the heart of Chinese and Thai cooking are used. The food is cooked in the traditional style – searing hot woks in an open-plan kitchen. The customers see exactly what is going on and enjoy the performance as much as the food they take home.”
Prospective franchisees are shown the existing Wok2go outlets and then treated to a cooking demonstration by George Leung. What they don’t realise is that he’s actually demonstrating how adept they will become after just one month of intensive training.“The secret is the way the store is laid out and equipped,” he says. “It is a fool-proof
‘production line’ in which the equipment helps with the cooking because of pre-preparation, timers, alarms and a simple one-stepafter- another process. Essentially, we find the premises, we prepare it, brand it, we equip it, we help find staff and then we train everybody – and much of the training is done with my team, on the franchisee’s premises. A big bonus is that the food makes for extremely healthy eating: no added MSG, less fat, reduced salt – and, even if I say so myself, it is to restaurant standard.”
Customers of the Wok2go are eating up to 3,000 meals a week containing less fat, reduced salt and no mono sodiumglutomate (MSG). “Best keep it quiet,” says George. “People seem to think that if a meal has content and ingredients which are really things they should be eating, then it can’t possibly taste good. We take as much salt and fat out of cooking as possible – and it’s helped even further by the searing heat we use in wok cookery – but we keep it quiet, and people still comment on how tasty it is. ”Wok2go Managing Director George Leung has been cooking since he was 11 years old. Descending from Chinese parents, but born in England, he has a natural love for both Chinese food and the ancient culture of China.
He was trained as a chef in one of his parents' five restaurants. In 1982 he opened his own restaurant, quickly followed by a second and third. Now he has put his reputation to the test by taking his restaurant-standard food into he take-away market – and he is also beginning to help work wonders with youngsters as well. Fed-up parents screaming at their kids not to play with their food should relax – and let them do precisely that as part of weaning them off junk dishes.
“Kids can be put off their whole meal because there is maybe just one item on the plate they don’t like – so we’re finding that an aromatic crispy duck with pancake, hoisin sauce and salad or vegetable strips is proving to be a real converter for kids who won’t normally try anything beyond a burger,” says George.
“There are a couple of key points: first, you can get away with saying the duck is chicken,and then tell them they can eat it with their hands. They might wonder what the catch is, but they’ll soon get stuck in. No kid will go without sauce, so soon they’ll be dipping it in the hoisin. But they also then get the choice of whether to wrap it in a pancake, which is fun in itself –and which is not as big and filling as a piece of bread – and whether they want to pick at the strips of cucumber too.”
“While they’ll always say they don’t like something before they actually try it, if they find they’re liking the ‘chicken’, they’ll start to wonder whether they’ll like the other things on the table,” he adds. “Sweet & sour chicken is another one to try them with. Parents are becoming more and more receptive to the healthy benefits of eating oriental, and they use slightly sweeter dishes such as sweet & sour and Cantonese sauces to get their kids interested. So far as kids are concerned it is effectively chicken goujons and a sauce.”
Wok2go offers plenty of training and support to its franchisees. Its continual marketing programme focuses on three areas: driving new customers to your takeaway, increasing revenue from existing customers and maintaining the best customer relationships in the industry. For more details email info@wok2go.co.uk or phone 08703655065 |
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