Trail meets Creams Cafe's Gavin King

Creams—the UK’s favourite dessert parlour—rolled out Trail across their 92 stores to centralise their compliance and digitise their records.

We caught up with Gavin King, the Audit and Compliance Manager for Creams.

We cover all the important topics, from his favourite dessert to how they maintain brand standards across the franchise. 

I am the Audit and Compliance Manager for Creams Franchising. I’m responsible for keeping our stores, teams and customers safe. I work with our franchisees and company stores to ensure brand compliance and 5-star scores on all of our doors.  

I am partial to cookie dough and chocolate gelato with extra chocolate sauce. 

We’ve started working with a new food safety partner who’s helping us design a centralised brand audit to be completed on Trail. Along with our Food Safety tasks, this audit will form part of our brand blueprint for all franchises to follow.

It was such an easy decision to roll out Trail to our 92 stores. Before the pandemic, we used paper-based record keeping. Switching to Trail meant no more issues with losing or damaging our records.

The stores use Trail to record their daily checks, e.g. temperature checks and cleaning procedures. The ability to add or remove items to the system instantly was a hit with all the stores.

And we now use Trail as a forum for sharing training videos and important updates.

We can now do things instantly that previously would have to go to the printers and be posted out to stores. That process itself can be time-consuming, not to mention the costs of printing record books.  

The last 12 months of Covid changes have required quite a few adjustments along the way, but it has meant Boris can make an announcement at 4pm, and by 4.05pm we can issue a company update and track if everyone has seen it.

As Trail can be used with any mobile device, including a phone, it has meant teams can update Trail anywhere in the store, ensuring the records are fully up to date.