About Us

Global Flavours, Local Solutions

Why and how we started

Starting the Flavour Gateway was the idea of some of the women attending the Business Start-up course delivered at City Gateway Women's Project. The City Gateway Enterprise Hub provides business courses and start up services and their incubator manager was tasked to work with the women's project to inspire business activities in 2008. This resulted in a business start-up project being launched with the women being involved in the process of developing the business plan.

Along the way they learnt the basics of marketing including defining their products, analysing and segmenting the market, understanding their target audience and defining the pricing approach. They took part in market research and in workshops to define their USPs, the branding approach and finally the name.

Some of the women even took part in a Dragon's Den Style pitch to secure the seed funding for the start-up of the business and were successful in their endeavours. Now the hard work starts ... making the business work. Having successfully delivered on our first orders including the 650 invitees at the 10th Anniversary event of City Gateway at East Winter Gardens in Canary Wharf, we are quietly confident about the future.

Our Vision

Our vision is for a sustainable catering enterprise that employs community members who are currently economically inactive in Tower Hamlets, and to provide them with on-the-job training, work experience and paid employment to enable them to obtain a job with a mainstream employer or to establish their own businesses.

Our Goals

To provide flexible employment and practical experience of working in the catering industry for community members in Tower Hamlets who are currently economically inactive, but who are keen to utilise their existing talents and the skills that they have learnt through participating in courses delivered by local agencies.
To provide a valuable community resource through the café at Weavers Field, enabling access to healthy, affordable food for local residents and facilitating social interactions within the diverse local community (including cross-cultural interactions).
To educate our customers about healthy and sustainable eating through provision of healthy, locally sourced options, and running awareness raising campaigns at the café.
To be a financially sustainable, profit making business.
To make significant financial contributions to the programmes of City Gateway from our profits

Our Services to Clients - Global Flavours

We have devised menus that reflect the diversity of Tower Hamlets and the team here at Flavour Gateway. This is what results in our unusual blend of international flavours which includes recipes from Bangladesh, India, Jamaica, China and Britain. This interesting fusion of flavour makes a welcome change to some of the more mundane alternatives that many of you may have become used to grumbling about.

Our Service to the Tower Hamlets Community - Local Solutions

Our business exists to provide practical solutions for the challenges facing economically inactive residents in the Tower Hamlets community. Women, for example, need flexible working arrangements and creche provision in order to more successfully transition into economic activity. Flavour Gateway is structured to provide this support and help our apprentices make the transition. We are looking at ways to provide further support that will help us to assist some marginalised groups among women including domestic violence victims. The Fresh Start project run by our sister project at City Gateway (City Gateway Women's Project), is a key focus. We hope to secure the premises that will allow a partnership of agencies to provide a one-stop-shop for DV victims to be able to transition from crisis to independent living, avoiding a return to the perpetrator.