Tokyo Industries targets student market with Get Baked partnership

The company, led by Aaron Mellor, launched Get Baked Presents The Joint - an 'anti-concept' burger and desserts restaurant and bar on the former site of Halo nightclub at Leeds University last weekend. 

Mellor told BigHospitality the new-look venue had 'exceeded forecasted expectations' in its first week of trading and the company was already looking at rolling the partnership out elsewhere.  

He said: “The Joint is phase one of a much bigger project for the Halo site which, when revealed this September, will essentially become the coolest student union you’ve never seen.

"We’ve been relatively late to the food market but we found some genius food partners in Get Baked and we’ve quite a fast track plan to roll this out through student areas – we’re already holding sites in Manchester’s Fallowfield and Newcastle.”

Student union​

Mellor said Tokyo Industries had identified a need to update the student union which seemed 'stuck in the late '90s'. 

He said: "Student Unions where great in the nineties and noughties. They had a controlled captive market but the game has changed and they’ve not really kept up. Sports Hall dining isn’t really what students want in 2015." 

The company, which operates 26 sites, also plans to re-launch five more of the seven sites it acquired through the PBR administration last year. 

In December it re-launched City Vaults in Newcastle as The Newcastle Bier Keller and then changed Halo at Leeds to The Joint. It will re-launch another three sites in Newcastle (Riverside, Waterside Hotel and Jimmyz), Klute in Durham and Cotton Factory in Huddersfield this year under a mix of different brands, such as Stein Beer Keller, Brewhaus and Get Baked.

There are also plans to open a Brewhaus in Bradford within the former Royal Windsor Baths which are connected to the Grade I listed Alhambra Theatre.