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16 October 2012 | Anna Reynolds

Pelican Buying Company has bought the Prestige Purchasing consortium, which aims to support UK leisure businesses’ buying power.

Pelican manages procurement for customers in the hospitality, education and private healthcare sectors, while the Prestige consortium works alongside clients primarily in the hospitality and food services industry, to improve value in their supply chains. Prestige Purchasing’s other operations, such as consulting, programme management and benchmarking, remain unaffected.

David Read, chief executive of Prestige Purchasing, told SM: “For our consortium customers, this is great news. The scale of Pelican Buying Group compared with the scale of the consortium will provide them with an improved service and better terms.

“Over the past five years, our business has been moving towards a consulting model. The consortium works well for SMEs, but our customers are increasingly more sophisticated when they come to us. They require a more bespoke model to optimise their supply chain. Pelican deals with outsourced buying and uses an aggregated model, which is why we felt our consortium was best placed with it as both models are appropriate for businesses.”

Read said the company can now focus on doing what it does best: “Our role with our customers can now be more focused, providing business with knowledge and best in class processes and skills.”

Shabaz Mohammed, managing director of Pelican, said: “The acquisition of the consortium business from Prestige Purchasing will enable us to bring these values and our expertise to current customers of Prestige Purchasing Consortium and the wider hotel sector.”

Read added that Prestige is planning to launch a new set of monthly market reports starting in December, dedicated to the food service industry. The initiative, called ‘Insight Business’, will consolidate food price indices, reveal the reasons for market changes and forecast future challenges and expectations. Read said: “Through these reports we expect to increase the number of consulting customers and generate large growth.”

The team of four working in the Prestige Consortium have transferred to Pelican. The size of the deal has not been disclosed.