At Karvin's Budgens Thetford, food-to-go is not tucked away in a corner waiting for shoppers to discover it. It is deliberately placed centre stage.
The store sits at the heart of Thetford's Riverside Leisure Complex, a mixed-use development featuring a three-screen cinema, 24-hour gym, 64-room Travelodge and surrounding housing. When Venkatesh Raja opened the Budgens store in July 2025, he knew its location created a very particular set of food missions from gym-goers and cinema customers to hotel guests, shift workers and late-night shoppers.
The response was to build a food-to-go operation around theatre as much as convenience.
The store has an open-plan kitchen and serve-over counter, with baking, preparation and cooking taking place in full view of shoppers. The idea is deliberately sensory: customers can see the food being prepared and smell it as it cooks.
Its Way2Sub FreshBite offer serves sandwiches and subs made to order, using bread baked in-store that day. There is a wide choice of fillings and breads, including foot-long sub rolls, with subs proving particularly popular at lunchtime.
The offer changes with the day. Hot Bake&Bite pastries cover breakfast, lunch and evening occasions, while freshly cooked boxed meals such as loaded nachos, fries and chicken wings cater to shoppers looking for something more substantial. These hot meals are particularly popular in the late afternoon and evening, helped by the cinema next door.
The surrounding businesses also shape the range. A nearby nightclub drives demand for late-night snacks and hot food, so the team continues baking until 9pm. Factories in the area bring in shift workers looking for something hot to eat before or after work.
Then there is the store's 24-hour proposition. Between 11pm and 6am, customers are served through a purpose-built night hatch at the front of the store, allowing the food-to-go operation to continue serving customers through the night.
Coffee has received the same treatment. Rather than relying on self-service machines, the store offers a barista experience, with a multi-skilled team preparing coffee and other hot drinks to order.
The food-to-go offer extends beyond the kitchen, too. On the shop floor, customers can find chilled packaged sandwiches alongside pies, pasties, snacks and soft drinks, creating a broader take-away mission around the freshly prepared proposition.
For a store that had been trading for only a year in Thetford, the proposition is notably ambitious. The business operates as a Budgens c-store, is between 1,000 and 2,500 sq ft, and is part of a wider five-plus-store operation. It buys through Booker and belongs to a symbol group, while retaining no buying-group affiliation.
Raja's approach is clear: understand the customers created by the location, then build the food offer around their routines. In Thetford, that means breakfast for the early starter, lunch for the commuter, a hot meal after the gym, food before the cinema, a late-night snack after the nightclub and something substantial for the factory shift worker.