The bottom Line: A woman's place is in the kitchen

Flavour Gateway Catering is an exciting new social enterprise in the heart of east London.  Our aim is to enable local workless women to get into employment while producing fresh, flavoursome food for local businesses and service providers… and for local people.

Flavour Gateway was pioneered by a group of women involved with courses run by local regeneration charity City Gateway. Despite desperately wanting to get into work, many women in the area struggle to find flexible employment that works around their families and also have little or no work experience to put on their CVs.

This said, having tasted their dishes, the City Gateway Women's Project team knew that the women they were working with had fantastic cooking skills. When the idea of starting a catering business at the women's centre was suggested, there was real enthusiasm to get involved.

City Gateway's Enterprise Hub delivers business courses and start up services, and I was tasked to work with the women to develop the catering enterprise idea in September 2008.

The group has a passion for healthy, fresh, international food and, given the ethnic mix of the group, our menus were destined to be diverse from the start. When doing some covert competitor analysis at a function in Canary Wharf, Flavour Gateway's now head chef Chandarani Kaur politely commented that the food was fine but ‘rather bland'.  Whether Italian, Indian or British, Chandarani's dishes are always mouth-wateringly tasty and full of flavour, which became the inspiration for Flavour Gateway's name.

Market research showed a real demand from local businesses and service providers for diverse, flavoursome lunch buffets and finger food. City Gateway Women's Project is located a stone's throw from the towers of Canary Wharf and we have already found great interest for Flavour Gateway's services from across the charity's network of contacts in the area.  Women were also keen to prepare food for the local community and the Flavour Gateway team will be opening a community café at City Gateway's women's project in Poplar at the end of April.

Income from the commercial catering services will support the café in providing healthy, affordable food to a community with poor health outcomes.

Funding secured in January 2009 also helped us appoint Moshoda Khatun - a lady who was once too afraid to get on a bus to come to City Gateway's centre -  as operations and trainee coordinator.

Ten other ladies are committed to becoming trainee kitchen assistants.

Flavour Gateway officially launched on 10 March when we provided a complete catering service for over 600 guests at City Gateway's tenth birthday celebrations in Canary Wharf - an ambitious start, however the event was a real success, and was a fantastic opportunity for organisations

Find out more at www.flavourgateway.com