Interview with Emma Paris, Co-Owner & Director of Balanced Living & The Living Cafe

Hear from Emma Paris, Co-Owner & Director of Balanced Living, and award-winning healthy cafe, The Living Café. Learn how Emma has overcome some of the biggest challenges she has faced as a restaurateur, and learn how Waitrr has helped her more efficiently allocate manpower in her cafe's labour-intensive operations.

Tip: for those who prefer to read, the video transcript is below :)

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Transcript:

Tell us about yourself and The Living Cafe. What can customers expect when they visit your restaurant? I'm one of the owners of the Living Cafe. We've been operating in Singapore since 2011. We're one of the original health food cafes in Singapore when there were very few places like us. We started life as a raw food restaurant, basically as a sister business to our wellness clinic.

In our clinic we advise people on diet and nutrition to basically obtain optimal health, and the cafe came about to showcase how really good healthy food could be delicious as well. And it wasn't just all about leaves and salads. And we sort of broke onto the Singapore scene as a raw food restaurant with amazing raw desserts, and salads and bowls.

And then over time we've sort of evolved, basically to meet the needs of our customers. Whilst we are, we still have a lot of raw food on our menu, we are sort of predominantly plant based, showcasing how plant based food can just be amazing and delicious and varied, but we do also  serve a little bit of fish and chicken on our menu but our founding principles remain the same. We don't serve any red meat, we don't serve any dairy, any cow dairy. We don't use preservatives, additives or any refined sugar in any of our food.

We don't use any vegetable oils. We only use coconut oil and olive oil in our food production,  that's something that's really important to us that we stick to the guardrails of why we were originally set up. And it's basically to provide food in its healthiest form to people to help them heal, get better and to be as well as they can be.

What are some of the biggest challenges you have faced in the restaurant industry and how did you overcome them? I think before, I mean before COVID hit one of the, I mean there are a few things that have been going on for a long time and have only got worse since the pandemic. Sort of number one up there would be staff manpower challenges. It's always been really hard to run a restaurant in Singapore because of the rules, by on who we can and can't employ.

It makes it extremely difficult. It's like running a business with one hand tied behind your back. ,   that's a constant, constant, challenge. And it's only got worse since the pandemic with the changes in where people live and what people are prepared to do. And that's an ongoing challenge that hasn't got any better. In fact that's got worse one of the big things that we've had a lot of trouble with is supply chain issues. Because we use quite complex ingredients. We use a lot of superfoods in our desserts. We try to infuse everything we do with superfoods and things that have maximum nutritional value.

We used to bulk buy a lot of those from the U.S. and that's become really problematic, because you know, the rising costs of shipping have gone through the roof, and just supply chain issues.   So the things that we've used very obscure ingredients that some people might not have heard of have just become really difficult to source now.

That means that we've had to change dishes and adapt and then we've adapted recipes to meet a new ingredient and then that ingredient's kind of no longer available. So then we've had to change again. It's been this constant adaptation to respond to and manage supply chain issues.

Increasing costs has been the other one. I mean the cost of raw ingredients and the cost of everything has just gone through the roof and that's really squeezed our margins and then that's forced us to put our prices up along with many other restaurants as well. And then just rent increases.

I mean, you know, everyone knows that the rentals in Singapore went crazy post Covid. And you know, we have a local landlord, who was opportunistic at that time as well.  So we've just been sort of hit on all sides with rising costs and a lot of challenges.

Can you share about your experience with Watrr and how it has impacted your operations? The original reason why we decided to onboard with Waitrr was for exactly that reason. We're a very labour intenserestaurant. Our food production is very labour intense. The complexity of our ingredients, the complexity of customers that come to us, people come to us with food intolerances.

You know, they can't eat a myriad of things so it's a very personable. There's a lot of interaction between the serving staff and the customers. We got Waitrr in to basically take care of some of the more sort of rudimentary stuff like placing your order, processing the payment and that going through the system, just that then our staff could focus on the questions and the customer service aspect of our business.

And we've adopted that just not long after Covid, or before COVID I don't remember, but it's definitely helped and it's allowed us to kind of focus the staff on the customer service aspect of what we need to do.

How do you handle feedback? This is a very challenging area. I mean food is a very emotional space. Like, people get very upset when they can't get what they want or they don't get what they want or they don't like what they get. And in our case, for people, it's often been life changing.

Like they've been told they can't eat gluten, dairy, soy, nightshade, I mean, huge lists of things. And  their life is really limited.  So when they come to us, they're quite emotional about first of all, they're very grateful because they come somewhere where they can eat what they want, but they're also very sensitive.

They have to be really careful. So we train our staff really well to make sure that they understand what the customers’ needs are. If someone can't eat gluten, that gets communicated to the kitchen. We have a whole protocol in the kitchen about how to deal with that.

It can be challenging, but we've got a lot of things in place that help us with that but, equally, you know, sometimes people are just unhappy and it doesn't really matter what you do, they're just having a bad day and they're going to take it out on your staff.

We've had some pretty challenging situations recently, which ended up with police being involved. It's been really, really tough, actually, but we, our staff know how to handle things and they know how to placate customers and just try and diffuse situation operations.

But then there's a kind of chain of command, like if people are very abusive. It's really quite shocking, when that abuse kind of goes up a level, then they get the manager to step in and then failing that, one of us, the owners, to come in and kind of deal with it, that's dealing with challenging and difficult situations.

On the positive side, we have a lot of customers who are lovely and they're just, they come into our cafe and they literally almost weep because they look at our dessert fridge and they're like, I haven't had desserts for years, I haven't been able to eat anything.

And we have this lovely kind of feedback where people are just grateful to come somewhere where they know they're safe and that they can eat well and that they're safe to eat everything that we have on our menu. Yeah, we get everything, like I'm sure most people do. And obviously when feedback, if we're constantly getting feedback about a certain dish or a certain item, then we will review that internally. And an example of that is we serve a chai latte, and people have a  perception of what, how a chai latte should taste.

But in our case, we do everything and we take, we do healthy version of it.  So our version of a chai latte involves organic tea and we make it with our own homemade plant mills and we make almond milk in house, and what we've come to realise is it's just not what people are expecting.

We're always trying to give people healthier versions of things, but if that's not what people want, then there's just no point doing it. We've had a lot of challenges with this particular drink, it's clearly not what people expect it to be, even though we think it's great. We've made a decision now to remove that because we were having too many problems with that and it's really just responding to customers, and making sure that they're happy with what they get and if something's really not working, then just move on. It's not worth it.

You know, we want our customers to be happy and they want to enjoy, we want them to enjoy their time when they come to us. That's an example of where we've adapted, and moved on for  something. We've had some situations where feedback, I feel like the Google review culture has got really, really negative.

People use that as almost like a weapon, like they threaten us with it. We've had a lot of customers threaten reviews and then go and write reviews when they're not happy about  mething. We’ve been very, we've responded and been very accommodating, but actually we've started pushing back a little bit because we've noticed people are coming in and they're, if they just don't like something, it's their personal opinion and it's quite subjective.

They're then using Google as a way to put us down and, and criticise where it's not necessarily justified. We've actually started sticking up for ourselves and responding to those reviews and pushing back a little bit, and it's been really positive because we've noticed since we've done that that people are actually kind of, it's changed the way people are writing about us now because we're sticking up for ourselves and, not just being a pushover. So if someone gives us feedback where it's genuinely warranted, we absolutely respond to that and we will take that. But if people are just doing that because they want to, it's their personal opinion and it's not, it's not really justified, then we're kind of we're pushing back and defending ourselves a little bit and. And that's been a bit of a change in how we respond to feedback.

What tips could you give to restauranteurs to to encourage people to come back? I mean, for us, it's the personal touch. It's. It's feeling welcome, it's being recognized. It's feeling like that. It's somewhere that they're known and appreciated and they're welcomed back. And we have a lot of people who've been coming to our restaurant for years and years.  Some people have been coming to our restaurants since we've been open, which is 13 years now.

And it's just that personal touch, like, “Hi, John, welcome back. It's really nice to see you again.”. People love that. And it's that people love being heard and listened to and I think from our point of view, that's the thing. People come back to us because they love our food and they know they can't get our food anywhere else and they know that what they're getting with us is good quality, healthy food with good quality ingredients. But over and above that, it's that personal touch of being welcomed back and then feeling like they're part of our family.

What do you think restaurant owners should start (or stop) doing? God, I'm not one to tell anybody what to stop doing. I mean, everyone has to run their business how they want. The thing that concerns me in restaurants is the quality of the ingredients. I think restaurants are being forced to compromise on ingredients and compromise on the quality of things and that concerns me. But that's me coming from a very niche position because we are in a very, we operate in a very niche space, which is using high quality ingredients, not compromising, not using vegetable oils, we don't deep fry anything. But that's not to say that  somebody else is doing that.

You know, if that's their core business, then, then that's up to them. But for me, what concerns me is the quality of the ingredients that are being used. And when you eat out, I think you're compromising your health a lot. What we should start doing, and I'm sure some people are, but is I just think we should all lobby the government to help us. If the government wants Singapore to have a variety of restaurants and for small businesses to do well, we need support and we need help. And I mean that in terms of just relaxing the rules and making it easiest for us to employ people to help us run our restaurants.

Because many restaurants are going under from a combination of things. But one of the biggest challenges is manpower and just not being able to employ who we want to employ. I put a job ad out, I'll get 50 CVs who are absolutely amazing. I might get one or two Singaporeans.

I'm lucky if they'll turn up for the interview, before I even get to sort of terms and whether we can afford to employ them. It's just so difficult. And it breaks my heart that there are all these people that need work that I would love to employ and could help me run my restaurant.

I think talking to the government and lobbying the government and just helping them understand how tough it is and helping us to mitigate those challenges with something that I think we should all do and perhaps collectively, if there are bodies that represent us. But I think more needs to be done.

How high (or low) is your employee turnover? How long have your staff been working with you? Most of our staff have worked for us for years and years and years. I mean, some of my staff have worked me for, like five plus years, one lady's worked for 10 years. We have a very low turnover. But I think that's because of the way that we run our business.

We really look after our staff. A lot of our staff have had young children while they've been working for us. I had young children as well. I've always sort of operated as like a family, and been very flexible and allowed them to take days off where they need it and to support them on that journey of parenthood.

I feel like it's been a really big family and I like to think that that approach has made us a place that people want to work. Our turnover is not high, but obviously it does happen. And when it has happened, it's been extremely hard to find people to take those roles.

Do you have any tips for restaurant owners that are facing peak hours and don’t know what to so? I mean, lunchtime is our peak time, and weekends as well. So brunch, lunch at weekends. We all have peak hours. It's how you manage it. It comes down to the staff and how they run the schedule, making sure you've got enough people in the kitchen. But we have times like, when someone calls in sick, like they're off for the day with one man down in the kitchen.

It's really all about managing expectations. When the kitchen gets really busy, if food is going to take a bit longer, then just make sure that customers are aware of that. And, I just always think, communicate with them, let them know, because there's nothing worse than leaving someone waiting for ages and they're hungry and their food doesn't arrive.

But if they know that it's going to take a little bit longer, then they can make different decisions or perhaps order a starter to tide them over. And obviously, with Waitrr in place, they've got the option to place their order online. And we always encourage people like that.

You can either place your order with us or place it online. That kind of speed up the ordering process. I think it's really just about giving them options and communicating.

How often do you change your menu and what inspires those changes? Good question. Because we update our menu a lot more now because we use Waitrr and it's easy. We can just add modifiers. We can trial things in our restaurant through monthly specials. We'll put something on and if it goes really well, then we'll add that onto the menu.

And what I love about Waitrr is we can just update that and it just takes a matter of hours. Whereas before, we would wait, have to do a complete redesign of the menu. We'd have to get it printed, and that just takes so much longer. We reprint our menu probably twice a year now, but we update Waitrr constantly. We're always adding new things in. And I like the fact that we've got that flexibility now. It's really enhanced our business.

Last question: What trends do you see emerging in the restaurant industry and how are you preparing for these new trends? One of the trends that we're looking at and that we're really excited about is regenerative farming. This is very specific, again, to our industry. This is probably not for most people. I'm talking kind of from our point of view, like, we're always looking for the best quality ingredients we can. Organic produce is so challenging to use because it's expensive and the supply chain is inconsistent but what we're looking at now is regenerative farming, which is a style of farming where the farmers are working in sync with the land and using sort of different crops at the same time that the soil quality is much better than it would normally be from typical farming, practises even organic farming.

One of the issues we're all facing these days is our food just doesn't have enough nutrients in it and that's because the soil is depleted. Regenerative farming is looking at putting all those nutrients back into the soil that the food you're eating has the things in it that it's supposed to have like magnesium, and zinc, and selenium, and vitamin C.

Yeah, we're really interested in this space, and we're working with a group of farmers at the moment to bring that produce into Singapore. It's starting in Singapore, but I think this is going to be the next big trend of produce.

You know, where everyone was thinking about organic, what we're seeing now is that actually the nutrient content of regenerative produce is better than organic and they're not using all the pesticides and things because they don't need to because the soil is healthy. They don't have all the pests and all the problems that they have. It's a kind of win win on all levels. You've got this produce that's got way more nutrients, way more nutrient dense, doesn't have the pesticide load on it and it's also cheaper than organic. I'm really excited about that, and I think for us, personally, because everything we do is about getting maximum nutrition into food. For us that's going to be a game changer and I'm really excited about that.

Before we let you go, would you like to add anything? I just always say to people, just really think about what you're putting into your body. You know, everything you eat impacts your health. And I think one of the things that people just don't realise is how much inflammation of sugar and vegetable oils and frying food, how much damage that's doing to your body.

Try and eat as well as you can and that's what we do. And we make food as delicious as possible, really healthy food, we make it really yummy. I would just encourage people to really think about your diet and try and seek out restaurants like ours who are trying really hard to give you good quality food. Because it's hard, but we keep doing it because we're passionate.