Walk into Kavanagh's Budgens in Belsize Park, north-west London, and the bakery counter does the talking before anyone at the till does. The croissants, cookies and sourdough loaves on display were, the night before, still just flour in bags at a bakery across London – nothing here is baked from frozen, and nothing is left to go stale. Whatever doesn't sell by evening is discounted and cleared, so that every day the counter starts again from nothing.
This relentless daily cycle – bake, sell, discount, clear, repeat – is the engine behind a win that store manager Kalman Mezei still speaks about with quiet pride: Bakery Retailer of the Year at the 2025 Asian Trader Awards. It is a category, he says, built on refusing to take shortcuts. “A lot of the places you go into serve pastries that are baked from frozen, or bread that's baked from frozen. We don't do that at all. Everything you see on our bakery tables was just flour in bags last night, all freshly baked.”
Kalman's path into convenience retailing was not a straight line. He spent his first 15 years working in hospitality before switching into retail, drawn, he admits, by hours that suited a more sociable life. From there he managed everything from food courts to petrol stations to supermarkets, building the kind of dual expertise – supermarket operations and food production – that would eventually make him the right fit for Belsize Park. He has now been with the Kavanagh Group for four and a half years.
The store he inherited was never intended to be an ordinary convenience shop. Following a top-to-bottom refit costing more than £3 million in December 2022, the 10,000 sq ft site was rebuilt around a single idea: a traditional grocery store crossed with a world-class food emporium.
“That was the ambition – a traditional supermarket combined with a food hall,” Kalman explains. “We do have fresh food counters, we have a fishmonger, a cheese monger, a full deli, and we produce all the food inside.”
It shows in the numbers. Under the previous owners the store's weekly turnover sat at around £80,000; since Kalman took charge alongside the Kavanagh family, that figure has more than doubled. Bread and bakery alone now account for more than six per cent of total sales.
Seven bakeries, one perfect table
Ask Kalman what makes the bakery offer special and the answer is not a single supplier but a curated network of them.
“We work with seven different bakeries, and I hand-picked all the best products from each one,” he says. “Some I found had the best croissants, some had the best pain au chocolat, and we're getting the best from everybody.” It is a sommelier's approach to bread – and, fittingly, wine is Kalman's other trained speciality, but more on that later.
The newest addition to the bakery counter has become an unexpected sensation. “Our real customer favourite is our cookies. We only launched them a few months ago and we just cannot make enough. We do a variety of six different cookies baked in store – you can smell them as you walk in.”
The scent, he says, is doing as much selling as the display itself, pulling shoppers past the bread aisle and towards the cheese counters and charcuterie that sit deliberately close by. “People don't just come for the fresh bread – they pick up other items as well. We have a whole selection we recommend to go with our cheese counters, or with our charcuterie meat.”
Kavanagh's Budgens in Belsize Park, LondonPhoto: Handout
Freshness is protected by discipline rather than luck. Every bakery product is made to last a single day; anything unsold is reduced by 30 per cent at 6pm to guarantee a clean slate each morning. “Most places you go to, you don't know if it was baked today. With us, everything is fresh every single day.”
That commitment to freshness sits inside a wider sourcing philosophy. Across the whole store, Kalman works with more than 60 suppliers, a number he sees as central to the shop's identity.
“We try to get the products to be as local as possible – we have suppliers that are only supplying us with one single product, because it's from the area, because we can claim that this is made within a couple of miles of the store. We want to support the local businesses,” he says.
“And it's the same for the bakery department. We try to work with local businesses as much as possible.”
The cleaner who became a baker
One of the best stories at Belsize Park is how Kalman spotted potential in a young Portuguese member of staff who had walked in looking for a cleaning job.
“He came to us four years ago and applied as a cleaner. I could see he was very disciplined, very precise – exactly the kind of person who would be good in production,” Kalman recalls. He offered him a route into the bakery department, starting with doughnuts. The young man said he was willing to try. “Since then, that's all he's been doing. He's learned how to make cookies, pancakes, brownies – the whole lot of scratch bakery – and he's been doing phenomenal products for us. He introduces a lot of new lines on his own initiative now.”
It is a story that says as much about Kalman's management style as it does about the employee. “I look for personality first, skill sets second,” he says. “You can have the best skills in the world, but if you don't like customer service, if you don't want to be there, it's worthless. Skills you can pick up on the job. Mindset, you can't.”
Salads in a heatwave
Food to go is, in Kalman's words, one of the biggest opportunities in convenience retailing today, and Belsize Park's in-store kitchen – staffed by four full-time chefs and a team of assistants – turns out sandwiches, salads, wraps and ready-to-cook trays entirely from scratch.
During this summer's heatwave, shopper habits shifted visibly. “People are buying a lot more salads than sandwiches because of the heat. Our Caesar and Greek salads are definitely the top sellers.”
Photo: Handout
The FIFA World Cup has brought its own seasonal lift, this time to the drinks aisles. “One of our key focuses with the World Cup is the drinks department – multipacks of beer, chilled drinks, ice cream. All of these are flying for us. Most of what we sell is already chilled, so you just take it home.”
New product decisions are rarely guesswork. A suggestion box collects direct requests from shoppers, while Kalman's team attends food fairs and exhibitions, checks the competition and monitors social media trends before deciding what belongs on the shelf.
A sommelier's wine wall
Kalman is a trained sommelier, and it tells in the drinks range he has built – a deliberate departure from standard supermarket wine towards niche and often exclusive labels.
This summer, rosé is also “flying”, he says, while English sparkling wine has been steadily rising for several years, closing in on the territory once owned by champagne. “Most of the English sparkling houses were set up by traditional champagne houses. As the climate becomes more like France, it's more and more suitable for wine production here.”
Photo: Handout
A similar instinct for reading the market shaped one of the store's more unusual pivots. When regulatory changes forced a reduction in vape fixtures, Kalman filled the gap not with more of the same but with premium spirits aimed at gifting.
“Our clientele tends to be a bit older, not as into vaping as the younger generation, so we decided premium spirits for gifting would work better. It's been a great success – we sell a lot of Japanese whiskeys and niche products that are very good for gifting.” The result: no losses in vape sales, and significant gains in spirits.
Family ownership, local lessons
The Kavanagh family, which owns the store as part of a wider group spanning 21 businesses across Ireland and the UK, are based in Ireland but visit regularly.
“It has their name on the door, so it's important to them that the store represents the family, that standards are always high,” Kalman says. That accountability has sharpened his own approach to reading a neighbourhood. Having previously worked mostly in East London, he found Belsize Park's shopping habits took real adjustment.
“Products that would regularly sell out in East London didn't sell for me in North London, and products that do sell well here, I wasn't even familiar with. It's about learning the locality.”
Kalman Mezei Photo: Handout
Brexit-related supply disruption, once a headache for sourcing European products, has largely settled, he says, and while shoplifting remains “a reality” for all retailers, targeted in-store work has left Belsize Park “in a much better place than we were two years ago”. Competition from the supermarket-owned convenience chains continues to intensify, but Kalman treats that as a reason to keep moving rather than a threat. “There are always places opening around you. That's why you need to keep innovating, to keep giving customers a reason to come back.”
The next reason is already brewing: a new partnership with Italian coffee brand Illy, aimed at delivering better quality at a competitive price as coffee costs continue to climb. “That's our focus for the next little while – getting that fully launched.”
Asked what advice he would give a fellow retailer chasing a standout convenience store, Kalman returns to the same instinct that built Belsize Park's bakery counter, wine wall and kitchen alike: know your customer before you know your fixtures. “Read your customers well, do your research. Once you set up a store, it's very difficult to change the bones of it. So do your research well for the area.”