FEATURE: Fuller’s pushes for quality staff at its new Kitchen Academy

But in September, the old signage was removed and replaced with smart Fuller’s Kitchen Academy signs.

This outward change reflects not only the building’s transformation from a pub to a training facility but also the serious investment and intent Fuller’s has for placing food – and back-of-house training - at the heart of its ongoing strategy.

Fuller, Smith & Turner (Fuller’s) head of talent Mark Peters says the company had wanted a dedicated space for some time that would enable it to much better focus on the quality and consistency of the food it offers across the 160 Fuller’s managed pubs that offer food. The development of new menus and the training of chefs to deliver it had been a fragmented arrangement.

“We had used various locations – at the brewery and other kitchen facilities such as Laverstoke Park – but when the Narrowboat became unviable because of the closure of a nearby bridge, it was decided to turn it into a state-of-the-art training kitchen” he says.

“The bar area was converted into MasterChef-style workspaces and the existing kitchen became the development kitchen for the executive chefs,” and adds £550,000 was spent on the kitchen equipment including the benches and the internal build.

Its location was perfect for its proximity to the Fuller’s estate – that encompasses London, the Cotswolds and Hampshire – and the facility has easy access to Reading train station and major road connectivity.

Roll your sleeves up

Peters points out cellar management and licencing courses are fine to run at the brewery [in Chiswick] or in function rooms but, with food, there had been no dedicated space for hands-on back-of-house training: “It’s not just classroom theory. It is roll your sleeves up with professional chef-skills trainers.”

Heading up this training is Luke Davies, chef skills training manager at Fuller’s Kitchen Academy, who has many years of experience training chefs and developing menus at Spirit Pub Co and Heineken UK’s Star Pubs & Bars – and he also ran his own pub before joining Fuller’s 15 months ago in a role created especially for the Kitchen Academy.

He has knowledge of other food facilities across the pub sector and says: “This is pretty special, especially to create it during these challenging times. It’s a wonderful investment in food. I was sold on the dream Fuller’s had.”

The facilities are open to everyone at Fuller’s and people in a variety of roles have passed through its doors since it opened in late September, including area managers, operations managers, commis chefs and chef de parties. There is a calendar of day-long workshops for chefs looking to acquire basic-to-intermediate skills. These include meat & poultry, steak & steak sauces, and knife skills.

The facilities are also used for employees on the Accelerated Leadership Programme for assistant manager roles, who will take a day course in food basics, and the Management Training Programme, who have a two-day course encompassing knife skills, the cooking of specific foods, and veg prep. In addition, those on senior level Apprenticeships (leadership in the kitchen) sometimes participate in courses as part of their training journeys.

As many as 459 full-day courses have been undertaken as of 26 February 2026 and, by the end of March, Davies says it should reach 600 that would put the Kitchen Academy on target for having hosted 1,000 courses during the company’s financial year.

Often such training facilities have the cooking workstations in rows like a classroom but Davies redesigned the space at the Kitchen Academy so they face each other. “It’s better to learn that way. These are structured courses but you also learn from the environment you are in and from chatting to colleagues. People have been very excited to be here as it’s an exciting environment and Fuller’s wants people to be passionate. It wants the retention [of chefs] and it’s a challenge,” he says.

He is aware retention will be one of his KPIs because Fuller’s management will want a return on its investment (ROI). “It’s early days, we’re only six months in and I welcome proving that the training has made a commercial difference. Retention is one measure and sales is another,” he acknowledges.

Davies very much wants the chefs to leave the academy inspired and to return to their pubs and successfully implement their learnings. “I send photos out to the heads of department and area managers to show them what I’ve encouraged their chefs to do. They love to see them having a good time,” he explains.

Executive chef team on-site

Where the Kitchen Academy will really deliver on the ROI demands is with having the executive chef team on the premises. The team of five, headed up by Jamie Stone, senior executive development chef, had previously operated individually on the road working in the kitchens of the pubs.

Fuller’s head of food Antony Bennett – who joined 15 months ago having worked latterly at Loungers for nine years where he was head of food – has built the team, with the new titles of executive development chefs. They each oversee two of the business’s menu concepts that comprise: Ale & Pie, Country Premium, Suburban London, Iconic Pubs, Transport Pubs, Food for Premium Drinkers, Classic Pubs and Destination Pubs.

Each executive development chef also supports the buying team with certain food types that include fish, meat, puddings and bread. They also work together on over-arching themes such as sustainability and Bennett cites the recent project with Wildfarmed Regenerative Flour that is now used within the business.

The core of their work at the Kitchen Academy is focused on creating dishes based on seasonality and within tight briefs centring on the customer demographics frequenting each cluster of pubs they oversee. “We understand the customer and we overlay this with innovation,” he says.

The menu development process begins with a marketing brief and a look at the current trends in the marketplace. Working closely with suppliers the executive development chefs create the dishes that will go into the dynamic menu bank and then onto the future new menus.

Having the Kitchen Academy has made the menu development process so much smoother than before, according to Bennett, who says: “We can develop the food here, do the cook-off process – in the pub’s former dining room – sign-off the menus, and then train the chefs here. It’s all in one hub under the one roof. Luke can see what’s coming down the line. It’s a joined-up approach.”

Key times of the year

Davies says he works very closely with the executive development chefs at the end of their process of creating new dishes for the forthcoming menus: “We’ll do the launch together and I then take the lead on all the training.”

This under-one-roof journey for new dishes is seen at the key times of the year when big menu changes are initiated – notably spring/summer, autumn/winter and Christmas along with other ad-hoc changes such as the recent introduction of a new breakfast menu. For each of these events the head chefs from all the pubs will receive an invitation to attend a course when they will be trained on all the new dishes.

The chefs are grouped according to the menu concept relevant to their specific pub and will join their own session to be trained on the new dishes that will be hitting their menus.

These groups will all be handled differently. For instance, the Destination Pubs grouping numbers only 10 sites and they have the most highly skilled chefs in the company, with their menus devised from a bank of dishes that are fixed but some of them are dynamic so they have some freedom unlike the pubs within other menu concepts that operate to wholly fixed menus.

Among this ‘Destination’ group is the Wykeham Arms in Winchester, Hampshire, whose head chef, Luke Emmess, is currently competing in MasterChef – The Professionals and made incredible progress in the show.

Although Emmess will be cooking to a very high level, Davies makes it clear that all the 160 pubs that serve food in the Fuller’s estate are creating dishes from scratch.

“This is not, in my experience, the case in all other pub companies. It’s not microwave-pinged food we’re serving. These are dishes where craft skills are needed. These skills are closely linked to the specification [devised by the executive development chefs]. They have to follow the recipes with accuracy and precision over speed. We want them to avoid going off-piste,” he suggests.

Behind this, of course, is the quality of the training, which Bennett says is critical and Fuller’s is working “tirelessly” to train its head chefs who then train the rest of their teams.

This is what creates consistency in the food leaving its 160 kitchens and engenders trust with customers who are increasingly demanding both quality and value for money when dining out.