Thai foodstuff chain cooks up £10m offer keeping 100pc equity
Thai Leisure Group will open up fourteen dining places more than the following two several years in a bid to ‘own Thai in the UK’ &#thirteen 
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Thai Leisure Team, which operates eleven dining establishments throughout Scotland and the north of England, has secured £10m from Santander to fund the founders’ ambitions to “own Thai cuisine in the UK”.
TLG secured the progress cash from Santander “at the 11th hour” right after eighteen months of talks with fairness investor BGF . “We approached Santander to see if it would fund us with no BGF and it said sure,” stated Mr Stead. “After 10 years of begging the banking institutions for funds on our knees, this is the first time we have been supplied real assist.”
BGF normally takes a minority stake in its expenditure firms but under the conditions of the Santander offer, the founders keep 100pc of TLG by way of a mixture of senior personal debt and progress cash.
Thai Leisure Team (TLG) operates two cafe manufacturers: a fantastic dining concept, Chaophraya, and avenue meals organization Thaikhun. Mr Stead mentioned that even though appetite for the higher finish eating places was minimal, the second company was a scalable design.
“We could have about fifteen Chaophrayas in metropolis centres throughout the British isles but with the avenue foodstuff, that’s a different animal entirely,” he mentioned. “We could do one hundred twenty those and we will roll out that enterprise extremely rapidly.”
The money injection will enable Martin Stead and his spouse and chef director Kim Kaewraikhot to open 6 Thaikhun sites this calendar year up from just two, and a additional 8 in 2016. “The goal is to attain 40 spots in forty months,” mentioned Mr Stead.
Kim Kaewraikhot, chef director of TLG, utilizes genuine Thai recipes
TLG created like-for-like income progress of 9pc throughout the previous 12 months, with revenues topping £27m. The growth will consider the kind of a “pincer movement”, Mr Stead stated, starting with Oxford, Cambridge and Guildford and cultimating with a launch in London.
“Georgraphically, we’ve currently captured the North,” stated Mr Stead. “We will now shift south and then seem to broaden internationally.”
There are at present close to one,600 Thai restaurants working across the Uk. “The Thai sector is hotting up in this country but there are only four or 5 that are not way of life companies,” mentioned Mr Stead. “No 1 owns Thai delicacies yet, and we want to become the national marketplace chief.”