Hot 100 2013 – 84: Lexington Catering

The basics

Company name: Lexington Catering
What they do: Specialist contract catering and hospitality
Headquarters: London
The Boss: Mike Sunley

The financials

Latest turnover (£,000): 23,765
Four-year compound sales growth (%): 30
Latest Ebitda (£,000): 1,077

The details

Lexington Catering is a City-based catering firm, offering anything from fish and chips to Michelin-star fine dining to London firms. The company’s 650 chefs and kitchen staff look after 50 business clients in the London’s City and the West End.

“The only prerequisite for clients is for them to have a kitchen – we don’t own any material, just the chefs,” says founder Mike Sunley. This, he says, takes a lot of risk out of the business and allows it to scale up or down to meet demand.

Lexington works with a select band of suppliers, which is one of the firm’s USPs. “Provenance of food and small suppliers are important to the business, and we’ve always been ahead of the game on that. Free range meat, organic produce, that is what we work with,” says Sunley.

While he admits that Lexington will “never be the cheapest”, that doesn’t seem to matter. The numbers speak for themselves – City firms are happy to pay for quality. Turnover has increased from £10.8m to £23.7m in four years, with an Ebitda of £1.1m.

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