A recipe for success with Hooked
Combining fresh ingredients, high-quality fish and a friendly atmosphere, Hooked is a seafood restaurant with a difference. And with 10 restaurants and food trucks in Copenhagen, plus one in Aarhus, it’s clearly a very popular choice. We spoke to Co-founder and CEO Kasper Christensen and his team to find out the secret behind their success.
Meet the team
- Who: Kasper Christensen
- Role: CEO and Co-founder
- Business: Hooked Seafood Kitchen
- Where: Copenhagen, Denmark
That serves up
- A friendly, unpretentious atmosphere
- A young, vibrant workforce
- A healthy work/life balance for staff
- Fresh delicious seafood dishes
Who are Hooked?
“Hooked started as a food truck. My good friend and co-founder Matthew is British, so he wanted to bring fish and chips to Denmark,” said Kasper.
That was back in 2016, and since then the business has gone from strength to strength. You can now eat fresh seafood in seven Hooked restaurants across Copenhagen, plus one in Aarhus, while their food trucks are regulars at summer events and festivals around the country.
As they’ve grown they’ve held on to their food truck roots, while their menu has evolved and matured into what Kasper calls ‘comfort food’.
But what’s not changed is the friendly, unpretentious atmosphere you’ll find at every Hooked truck and every restaurant, stretching from the kitchen to front-of-house and on to the customers. And with 160 employees now across the business, that’s no easy task.
Kasper said: “Working in the restaurant industry is a lot about having fun and enjoying time with your colleagues. So we try to create a very casual, informal culture.”
The challenge
As Hooked started to grow and take on employees, the need for a proper workforce management tool became obvious. And Kasper knew exactly where to turn.
“I knew about Planday from before. I used to work in hospitality, and Planday was one of the systems I've worked with,” he said.
“So when we started to employ people and had to keep track of shifts and staff, it was the obvious solution to use the system that I knew.”
And as the business has grown to restaurants and food trucks all over Copenhagen and beyond, so too have the challenges. Maintaining staffing levels across 11 locations, dealing with absences and communicating with a 160-strong workforce, to name just a few…
The solution
“Planday has allowed us to use our whole workforce, crossing between restaurants,” said Kasper. “One of the biggest problems we have is people calling in sick or holes in the rota and so on. But with Planday, if someone is sick in Christianshavn, then the shift is open for someone in our Vesterbro department to take.”
And with the simple communication tool in the Planday app, employees are able to take matters into their own hands and maintain a healthy work/life balance that’s so important in this industry.
“Planday helps our employees communicate with each other. So if they want to swap shifts or need a shift covered or whatever, they can communicate directly in the app,” said Kasper.
“It also links to our own internal staff app, so when someone communicates in one app and changes something in one app, it automatically changes in the other.”
The result
Planday has been with Hooked on every step of its journey to where it is today, and Kasper doesn’t know where they’d be without it.
He said: “Running a restaurant without Planday would be very tricky, especially when you’ve reached the size that we’ve reached.”
As for the Hooked employees, Planday makes their lives easier right from the moment they join the business – as Hooked’s HR Manager Sara Mollen Christensen told us.
“We use Planday for onboarding as the first step actually. So once we've agreed to someone being employed, we set up onboarding shifts first hand and then actually a lot of our onboarding runs through Planday,” she said.
“So instead of me having to ask everybody if they changed their address or changed their name or anything like that, they themselves are able to change it. And then I know that I simply need the information in Planday, I don't have to ask around. So it's a big time saver for me.”
Looking to the future
So, where next for Hooked? They’ve successfully brought English fish and chips to Denmark, and conquered Copenhagen in the process, but they’re not done there.
“Currently we're getting to the point of saturation in Copenhagen. So we are looking for the next market to explore,” said Kasper.
“In the future, we would like to expand into other European countries, and we will definitely use Planday on that journey. If the system works I don't want to change it, and it works seamlessly.”
Ready to see results like Hooked?
