Arran Brewery plans chain of craft beer bars as it launches crowd-funding push: The Arran Brewery has launched a crowd-funding initiative, aiming to raise £4m to upgrade its brewery on Arran, develop two new breweries on the mainland, a brewing school and to open a distillery – and a chain of craft bars. Arran Brewery saw sales of £834,829 in 2012-13, an increase of 15% on the previous year and profit after tax of £66,851, an increase of 30% on the previous year. The company plans to open the Forth and Clyde Brewery on the site of the former Rosebank distillery in Falkirk. In addition, Arran plans to open the Loch Earn Brewery on the site of the former Drummond Hotel in St Fillans next year – a hotel and visitor centre is part of the plan. It also aims to open a micro-distillery and bottling plant at the former Rosebank distillery as the Camelon distillery and enter the craft spirit market producing artisan vodka, gin and, eventually, whisky on the site. The company is also in negotiations over taking a lease on a property in Hope Street, Glasgow which the company intends to open as a craft beer bar called “Arran on Hope Street” – the company will use £600,000 of the £4m raised to open further craft beer bars. Another £600,000 will be spent on the Forth and Clyde Brewery and £1.4m is ear-marked the Cameron Distillery refurbishment and commissioning, including a bottling plant. A conditional grant of £500,000 has been awarded by Historic Scotland in relation to work at the Forth and Clyde Brewery and Cameron Distillery projects. Arran Brewery produced 412,500 litres of beer in 2012, below the 500,000 litres limit needed to claim 50% brewery duty relief. The company stated: “If Arran Brewery had produced 500,000 litres in the calendar year ended 31 December 2012 it would have been liable to pay full duty on its beer production which would have added an estimated cost of 48 per litres to Arran beer production costs. The directors are of the view that if Arran is to increase its volume of beer production beyond 500,000 litres per annum it will need to grow quickly to a scale of production which makes its operations economically viable given the higher rate of duty that will apply.” Managing director of Arran Brewery is Gerard Michaluk, who graduated from Heriot-Watt University and has published two books on marketing practice.

Giggling Squid in negotiations on small package of sites: Giggling Squid, the Thai restaurant brand led by Andy and Pranee Laurillard with ambitions to become the UK’s first national chain, is in negotiations to buy a small package of four of five sites that could lift estate size to 15 by summer 2014. The company opened its seventh site in Stratford two weeks go, converting a former Strada. The company took possession of the keys to the former Giraffe in Horsham yesterday and is working on a site in Marlow currently – both sites are scheduled to open in mid-February 2014. Giggling Squid is set open its biggest site so far in Maidstone with 4,500 square feet of space on the ground floor - landlord works are underway with a pre-summer 2014 opening planned. Andy Laurillard told Propel that the company is in negotiations over a package of sites. “We might be at 14 or 15 sites by summer 2014.” Laurillard also reported that like-for-likes are in growth across the estate.

Dine-in.co.uk launches fund-raising on crowd-funding website Crowdcube: Dine-in.co.uk, the business that delivers food from London restaurants to people’s homes, has launched on crowd-funding website Crowdcube with the aim of raising £300,000 for 23.08% of its equity. So far, £93,660 has been raised from 13 investors. Founder Evan Graj, a former equity trade at Cantor Fitzgerald, said: “Our website and delivery service launched the in the summer of 2011 with 15 restaurants while I still had a day job. Now, we are the second largest delivering for over 100 of London’s best restaurants including one Michelin star, 27 different cuisines servicing thousands of registered users, a few corporates, and have just recently started adding accredited chefs who cook in their own homes. Our business model is simple. We charge restaurants and chefs a percentage of the total order plus a small delivery charge to the customer based on distance. We are looking for a trade sale at the end of year three. We hope many of the current online takeaway web sites will be interested in us because of our corporate focus, our Dine-n-Save Corporate Technology Product, and a unique set of restaurants, and upscale brands. We could offer additional revenue with not much additional cost because we will mostly likely have similar downstream supporting infrastructure such as sales, restaurant on-boarding, customer service, menu updates, technology spend, accounting, legal etc. With companies like eBay purchasing Shutl in order to get into the one-hour delivery space, our Delivery Tracker Platform could be appealing in order to facilitate delivery in other verticals.” Sales have reached £30,000 per month and grew 20% from August to September and again from September to October.