The hospitality operation hiding inside your local garden centre

Walk into one of the UK's leading garden centres today and the café isn't an afterthought – it's a destination. Barista espresso, stone-baked pizzas coming out of an open kitchen, gelato counters with queues out the door, self-serve stations that rival any fast-food chain for speed and efficiency. The garden centre restaurant has grown up, and the operators running them are investing seriously in the equipment, the design and the customer experience. 

The numbers back it up. Catering now accounts for 19% of total garden centre turnover, up from 15% in 2022, according to the Horticultural Trades Association. In January – when plant sales are at their lowest – that figure rises to 23%. The café is no longer a seasonal amenity. For many garden centres, it's the single most important revenue stream outside of plants. 

148 million visits were made to garden centre cafés and restaurants in 2024. 82% of garden centre visitors used the café at least once during their visit – making it, for many customers, as much a reason to come as anything else on site. 

The people running these operations didn't stumble into it. The bigger groups have hired experienced F&B directors, operations managers and executive chefs to drive their food offer forward. But the pace of expansion is relentless, and even experienced hospitality teams are making high–stakes decisions on tight timelines – new builds, kitchen refurbishments, equipment upgrades – at a speed the supply chain hasn't always kept up with. 

And beyond the major groups, there are hundreds of independent garden centres investing in their food offer for the first time, or scaling up from a simple café to a full restaurant operation. These operators are making significant capex decisions – commercial kitchen equipment, café equipment, refrigeration, font-of-house technology – often without a dedicated procurement team to support them. 

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Standing out from the crowd 

With so many garden centres now running serious food operations, the next battleground is differentiation. Operators don't just want kit that works – they want equipment that sets them apart. A La Marzocco espresso machine on the counter signals something to a coffee–literate customer. A wood–fired pizza oven visible from the dining room creates theatre. A cold-press juicer or a soft–serve ice cream station that goes viral on Instagram. 

Self–serve stations that rival fast food chains for speed and efficiency are increasingly on the wishlist too – particularly for high–footfall sites where queue management is a real operational challenge. The best garden centre cafés are benchmarking themselves against the best in hospitality, not just the best in garden retail. Their suppliers need to match that ambition. 

Where the opportunity sits 

This is where commercial kitchen equipment suppliers, café equipment specialists, wholesale beverage suppliers and foodservice technology providers have a valuable role to play – not just as vendors, but as partners who understand the operational reality of running a high-volume café inside a retail environment and can bring solutions that actually fit. 

The brands that win these accounts are the ones who show up with quality products and a wealth of F&B knowledge, not just a price list. 

Glee's dedicated Food & Beverage zone brings catering equipment suppliers, kitchen designers, wholesale beverage suppliers and foodservice specialists together with the operations directors, F&B managers and owner-operators making these investment decisions. If you want to get in front of the people driving garden centre hospitality forward, this is where that conversation starts. 

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Glee 2026 takes place 8–10 September at the NEC Birmingham, co-located with Autumn Fair on 8–9 September.