Lindley Venue Catering, the sports stadia catering division of The Lindley Group, has won a four-year contract to develop the catering, hospitality and events business at Watford FC’s 19,900-capacity Vicarage Road ground.
The £5.6m deal is the latest in a series of stadia contract wins, extensions and renewals for Lindley Venue Catering in the lead up to the new season, with Rotherham FC, Notts County FC, Millwall FC and Tottenham Hotspur FC signing up.
Lindley Venue Catering has a full service remit at Watford FC including responsibility for match-day public and hospitality catering, as well as providing a sales and marketing function to increase use of the facilities for non-match day events.
Catering at Vicarage Road has been managed in-house, and new CEO Scott Duxbury says that bringing on board a specialist stadia and events caterer will boast catering resources, bring more focus to this area of the club’s business and help develop another revenue stream.
“We have been looking at all aspects of the club and felt that catering and hospitality where areas where we could benefit from the expertise and experience of a specialist,” says Duxbury. “I invited Lindley Venue Catering to put forward its ideas for how it could work with us on developing the match-day catering and events business at Vicarage Road over the next four seasons, and we were impressed with its vision for how we can maximise the revenue potential from catering to invest back into the club.”
Jonathan Davies, The Lindley Group’s Sales and Marketing Director, adds: “As a business with a new management team Lindley has also undergone something of an evolution over the past two years and with the creation of the Lindley Venue Catering division we have focused our skills in the professional stadia catering sector.”
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