City Harvest had already doubled its growth over the past few years and Covid-19 brought a further huge increase in demand for r services to those in need in London communities.

Nikki Tadema, chief operational officer, at City Harvest says: 'We had plans to increase our warehouse space pre COVID-19 and realised that our need to increase our service meant we needed a larger space. We managed to secure a fabulous new depot on our existing site that saw us move from just under 4000 square foot to just under 14000 square foot - hence we needed a Ferrari of fridges.

“As we were led by a grant to build our new home we had to go out to tender and have at least three companies bid for the work. Gary from Royale, arrived to do a site visit and compared to the others he was just excellent and instantly knew what I was after. Price was a contributing factor, but the main decision came from Gary offering to project manage the whole fit out for me. A huge help as being a not-for-profit we don’t have the luxury of bringing in a project manager and this helped me so much as I was still able to run our full operation.”

Gary Millard, commercial director at Royale adds: “It was lovely to meet Nikki and help design a solution to manage the amount of food City Harvest need to sort, prep and distribute on a daily basis. We added a temperature regulated prep room, adjoining a freezer cold room and cold room designed with floor guides to sort and store the food. We also installed Daikin air conditioning in the new offices and installed a storeroom and kitchen, made with food safe cold room panels, within the main warehouse.

'The whole project has been a joy to work on and it was made even more special knowing we were able to play a part in creating this amazing space to in turn help and support many vulnerable people. City Harvest really is an amazing charity.”

Ms Tadema concluds: “The on-site engineers were just fantastic, nothing was too much and they were an absolute pleasure to have on site, I’m over the moon to see the initial ideas come to life.”