WIXTED CATERING & CONSULTING ANNOUNCES UNIQUE PARTNERSHIP: CREATING THE LARGEST FOOD, DRINK & HOSPITALITY INNOVATION & VENTURE AGENCY IN AUSTRALIA
1st of March 2020, Darwin & London: Wixted Catering & Consulting has announced it is joining forces with Xpert Innovation and World of Zing, to create the largest Food, Drink & Hospitality innovation, experience and venture consultancy in Australia, Wixted Innovation, specialising in the food, drink and hospitality industries.
The partnership will focus on helping Australian companies grow the share of their food, drinks and hospitality business both locally and in the global marketplace. Their vision is to bring food and drink ideas to life, new products, brands and services to market and to co-venture new businesses with clients and other food entrepreneurs.
The partnership brings together Wixted Catering & Consulting founders, foodtpreneurs, catering company founders, product developers and identical twin brothers Andy & Mark Wixted with award-winning Xpert Innovation founder Greg Wixted and World of Zing founder Pritesh Mody.
Wixted Catering is Darwin-based and set up by the Wixted brothers, Mark, a consulting head lecturer and assessor in Commercial Cookery charged with training the next generation of chefs. Together with Andy oversees an ever-growing portfolio from FoodTech, recruitment, restaurants, specialist catering ventures to Schools & Co, a new and innovative approach to school catering, whereby students work with chefs, nutritionists and designers to create healthy school food and a canteen space they love in their school. They both have consulted on food and drink product development and innovation projects, for leading global brands.
Xpert Innovation is a consulting firm based in Europe and the Middle East. For the past ten years, Xpert has worked with clients including Bakkavor, Blue Skies, Hearst, Sanrio, Diageo, ABS, Starbucks and Dunkin Donuts and has a portfolio of start-ups spanning the UK, USA, Spain, Serbia and the Maldives.
World of Zing is often recognised as one of the UK’s most innovative drink entrepreneurs. It brings exciting moment of mixology and cocktail innovation to a wider audience, operating from one of Europe’s most advanced cocktail labs – including Molecular Mixology and Cocktail Ageing facilities. When not developing products for their 200 or so trade clients, the team can be found helping global brands like Diageo create unique drinking experiences.
Together, they are on a mission is to help companies rapidly create and test on-trend, first to market, high growth food and drink ideas and experiences consumers love. They do it by applying their Rapid Entrepreneurial Innovation (REI) model and a page from the Agile playbook which accelerates the time to market. It instils a culture of customer first thinking, data and insight driven decisions, a love of food and your product, rapid experimentation and iteration of the idea through testing and feedback until it is ready to launch.
Zealous opposers of the ‘one size fits all’ innovation approach, the companies run real food, drinks & hospitality businesses both in Australia and internationally, and know what it takes to develop great, tasty, innovative and immersive food experiences.
They innovate with entrepreneurial spirt and agility – while others are still thinking how to respond to a client’s brief, they will have already started to invent fresh, new, first to market ideas.
“Consumers are looking for differentiated products that cater to their needs, but more so they want to see companies offer added value, not just authentic, healthy and high-quality ingredients,” said Mark Wixted.
“We really want to focus in on creating value-adding opportunities for Australian products in key growth areas. These include health and wellbeing, premium convenience foods, and sustainability-driven products that reduce waste or use less resources, traceability and provenance and food safety.
“But, more importantly, we want to grow the skills and knowledge base of people in the industry here. We started by training all our teams in innovation and new product development (NPD) and will be offering our style of training to all food and drink companies in Australia.”
The key driver for the business with be working with companies to help deliver increased productivity, sustainable economic growth, job creation, and investment attraction to the food, drinks and hospitality sectors. Through this partnership, Wixted Catering and Consulting will be able to offer its expertise for not only the Australian market but internationally.
To coincide with the announcement, Wixted Innovation has released its first food & drinks insight report, What will Eat and How will be Buy It and Consume it in Australia in 2020.
