City centre health food store to close its doors after just two years

A fast-food store which specialises in healthy meals has announced it is closing its Manchester city centre store.

Bosu Body Bar is closing its Cross Street store after almost two years.

The firm said it will be focusing entirely on its nationwide chilled delivery service and expanding its online meal offering.

Bosu opened its Cross Street store in early September 2017 and their protein packed meal boxes attracted a loyal base of healthy eaters that included Manchester United stars Jesse Lingard, Marcus Rashford and Marouane Fellaini.

Bosu’s founder and creative director Oli Drummond said: “We’re excited to continue the growth of Bosu online, and although we’ll be sad to leave Cross Street behind us it’s important to remember it’s served us well in growing our brand name and reaching a larger customer base.

“The Bosu restaurants have allowed us to get to know what our customers want, build up their trust in our product and gain a loyal following.

“We arrive at this point with a meal prep product we believe to be one of the best on the market.

“Focusing solely online will now allow us to pay more attention to our customers and develop our products further. In return this should result in greater customer satisfaction and increased retention rates.

“With the health and fitness market continuously growing and so much emphasis on what we put in our bodies, we plan to now focus on reaching an even wider audience online and demonstrating why Bosu has always been such a hit and the ‘go to’ when it comes to healthy eating.”

He added: “The health and fitness market is where our core offering of healthy meal-plans gained traction, but we’re seeing new opportunities all the time.

“You don’t need to be hitting the gym every day or counting nutrient macros to enjoy the benefits of a fresh, healthy meal-prep service.

“Over the past year in the city centre, we’ve noticed a growing number of customers who just want a convenient lunch option to eat at work, rather than a specific meal-plan to support their health and fitness goals. Being online means we can offer more choice to that market too.”

Bosu plan to meet city centre demand by offering group lunch delivery and office catering options, something they can do better via the online delivery model than with a traditional bricks and mortar store.

Oli Drummond said: “Over the past year it has made less and less sense to carry on meeting the economic demands of having a high street location when we could be serving those same customers better with an improved online delivery service and expanded range of healthy meal plan options.”

“And since the majority of our revenue has always come from our nationwide delivery service, dealing with challenges of operating a city centre centre location risked becoming a distraction to our long-term goal of being the UK’s leading healthy meal-prep delivery provider.”

The Bosu team, including fellow directors Josef Faddoul and Sarah Jane Beck will be on-site until Tuesday next week fulfilling online orders, before moving to a new commercial kitchen outside of the city centre.

Any food left over at the end of Tuesday will be given away for free, with priority going to local homeless people.