- Sector :
- Farm Shop, Butchery, Café & Estate Retail
- Location:
- Welbeck Estate
- Features:
- Cloud-based EPOS, integrated weighing equipment, café ordering workflow, DOJO payments, mobile trading, live reporting
- Results:
- Faster service, simpler stocktaking, improved flexibility, better visibility and a stronger operational platform across the wider estate
Vision & Context
Estate-grown, artisan-led, customer-focused
Set within the historic Welbeck Estate in Nottinghamshire, the retail interests sit at the centre of one of the country’s most respected food and artisan communities.
Welbeck Farm Shop is built around provenance and quality, with estate-grown and locally sourced produce sitting alongside some of the estate’s best-known products, including Stichelton cheese, Welbeck Bakehouse bread and pastries, and beers from Welbeck Abbey Brewery.
Its butchery is one of its strongest assets, with experienced butchers, estate-reared meat and a reputation for quality that has helped the business earn national recognition.
Across the courtyard, the Harley Café serves fresh, high-quality food built around the same produce and principles, while the Harley Gallery adds a fabulous cultural and historical layer to the visitor experience.
It is a fully-fledged estate retail operation, with all the complexity that entails.
Like any growing business, there comes a point when the systems underneath need to keep up with developments and progress in other areas.
Welbeck Farm Shop, Harley Café and The Harley Gallery on the breath-taking Welbeck Estate
Challenges
One estate. Multiple operations. One growing problem.
At Welbeck, retail doesn’t happen in one place. A customer might start in the farm shop, stop at the butchery counter, head across to the Harley Café for lunch, and pick something up from the Harley Gallery before leaving.
Behind that experience sits a business with many moving parts, all of which need to stay connected and in sync.
Welbeck’s previous EPOS platform had been in place for years and, for a time, had done the job well. However, as the estate continued to evolve, the speed and development of the old EPOS slowed. Updates became infrequent, and simple changes often proved more difficult to implement than before. Over time, the system became clunky to use, and it began to affect day-to-day operations.
In the farm shop, where fresh produce, butchery and weighing equipment all need to work together, speed and accuracy matter. In the Harley Café, orders need to move quickly from till to kitchen, particularly during busy service periods. Across the courtyard, in the Gallery, flexibility and mobility are just as important.
Additionally, the infrastructure behind it all needed to be considered.
Running the old on-premises EPOS meant dealing with expensive Microsoft SQL servers, long out-of-hours software updates, and licensing, all of which put extra pressure on the internal IT team and added to the cost of maintaining the wider setup.
What Welbeck needed was Storefront™, our flexible, cloud-based platform that supports how the business trades today whilst allowing room for future developments and connected projects on the estate.
What EPOS Cubed Delivered
One connected retail platform across the welbeck estate
EPOS Cubed replaced Welbeck’s existing EPOS platform with Storefront™, delivering a fully cloud-based solution across the farm shop, Harley Café, Harley Gallery and horsebox trading operation.
The wider project included:
- Multiple farm shop tills.
- One mobile tablet till for horsebox trading.
- Multiple Harley Gallery tills and a mobile tablet.
- Several Harley Café iPads replaced the old legacy Windows devices.
- Drinks and Kitchen printers.
- Reused Bizerba scales.
- Integrated DOJO payments.
- Full staff training and ‘Go-Live’ support.
The result is a fully connected estate-wide retail platform, without the ongoing burden of SQL servers, manual updates or restrictive payment integrations.
FLEXIBILITY
Built around how Welbeck trades
Welbeck’s operation stretches beyond a single retail space, encompassing the Farm shop, Harley Café, The Harley Gallery and mobile horsebox trading.
Storefront™ brings those activities together within one platform, making it easier to manage products, pricing and performance consistently across the Estate.
Instead of separate pockets of information, the team now has a clearer view of how different parts of the business are performing and contributing to the wider operation in real time.
Less technology
Moving from a traditional server-based system to Storefront™ has removed much of the infrastructure burden.
The Welbeck team no longer needs to worry about maintaining databases, managing server updates or relying on ageing hardware, giving them more time to focus on customers.
People who care
One of the biggest reported benefits has been working with a team that is available, responsive and invested in helping the business succeed.
Particularly when go-live spans multiple trading areas, devices, and kitchen workflows.
Inside Welbeck Farm Shop & the Harley Café
Built on quality, now supported by modern retail technology
Lessons for Other Estates
Reflections for farm shops and mixed retail businesses considering change
- Complex retail needs flexible systems: Businesses that trade across multiple locations and formats (i.e., Retail & Hospitality) need systems that can handle both.
- Old infrastructure creates hidden pressure & cost: Server management, licensing, and manual updates are expensive and take time away from retail.
- Stock control shapes everything: Better stock visibility and stocktaking improve accuracy, availability, margins, and confidence.
- Support matters: Good systems matter, but so do the people behind them. Ensure the support team you work with understands the pressures/realities of your sector.
