Our Values

Communicate with integrity, openness and honesty
To treat everyone as we would wish to be treated ourselves, most of all with respect and dignity; to give all customers a warm and sincere welcome, never letting our popularity tempt us to take anyone for granted.

Think long term
This is no get-rich-quick scheme. We strive to develop long-term relationships with employees, customers and suppliers. We are proud to be putting down roots in the community; growing and developing the business to be the cafe and employer of choice.

Community involvement
We play an active role in the community, employing and developing a wide range of local folk in different roles, buying from local farmers and artisan suppliers, supporting and sponsoring community projects and events such as The Killin Highland Games Hill Race, The Highland Fling and The West Highland Way Race.

Outstanding quality
We are entirely and totally committed to an exceptional quality of our products and customer service. This commitment to pioneering a new, simple, sustainable ethos for fast food has not changed since day one.

Protect our beautiful environment
Wherever possible we will continue to use more and more sustainable and biodegradable food containers and cleaning products. We will enlarge our recycling programme, continue to improve our energy efficiency and reduce the carbon footprint of the business.

Our Gospel

We are lucky enough to live in this beautiful part of the world, bountiful with the highest quality raw ingredients. We have tried, wherever possible, to source some of these products for the enjoyment of your taste buds! Where products are not available locally we have come up with the best alternative from elsewhere.

We have thought about everything we sell and look to provide healthy, high quality, great value for money food which we can prepare and serve to large numbers of you within a reasonable time frame, we aim for 15 minutes maximum.

Our haddock and coley come from sustainable stocks in the Barents Sea and are supplied to us by Fastnet from Fort William.

Our potatoes (approx three tonnes per week in the summer) come from William Bell our potato merchant at Glasgow fruit and veg market, we are however always looking suppliment our suppliers for good local sources of vegetables and salads, if you know anyone please tell us!

All our fried food is cooked in rapeseed oil which is a monounsaturated fatty acid, rich in Omega 3s. This type of fat is relatively stable to oxidation and rancidity and in nutritional terms is considered one of the better types of fats to eat.

Our butchery products come from Alistair Gourley in Crieff. Alistair heads the family company that was established in 1946. He supplies us only Perthshire, beef, pork, lamb and wild venison and free range poultry from Fife. He is very hands on and personally makes and delivers all the food for our cafe every week.

We take our sourcing very seriously. If you would like to know more about the ingredients and provenance of the food we sell please ask us to see the file we have put together with as much information as we can gather on these important subjects. Additionally, we randomly send food samples away for independent scientific testing so that we can verify in so far as is possible that what we are being told we are selling to you is actually what you are getting.

Our ice-cream comes from Equis in Lanarkshire. Equis was established in 1922, uses no milk powder at all in their ice-cream production, they use only Scottish fresh milk and double cream. In November 2004 Equis won Best Vanilla Ice Cream at the UK National Ice Cream Championships, taste it for yourself.

Compliment your meal with a luxury cup of coffee, available from a genuine Italian Espresso machine, or as filter coffee. Matthew Algie (who have been in the coffee roasting business in Glasgow since 1964) supply us with our organic, fairtrade coffee beans and drinking chocolate. This means that the coffee, tea and chocolate have been harvested on farms that have strict standards in place to ensure no artificial fertilizers are used and that the workers have a fair and dignified way of life.

Feast on our new selection of home baking which is all made here on the premises by a real person every day from scratch ,she definitely won't use mixes!!

Lastly but by no means least, we believe in respecting and protecting this lovely environment. We try to ensure that we are constantly moving towards more and more recycled and biodegradable take away packaging and cleaning materials. We reuse and recycle by products of the business such as the old oil which is turned into bio-diesel on which we run our vehicles.

We are constantly looking to improve the energy efficiency of all that we do to minimise our impact on the planet. It saves money too, which is an added bonus!

Ironman Lanzarote Triathlon

Sarah Heward from the cafe and Pete Waugh from Tay Fitness and will be attempting this event on 22 May 2010 at 7.00 a.m. starting in Porta de la Carmen, Lanzarote. The event comprises a 3.8km swim, 180km bike ride followed by a 42.2km run. All of this back-to-back on the same day. Pete and Sarah have covered 100% of their own costs so every penny donated will go to the three local worthy causes. Please help by giving generously.

This page is dedicated to Steve Wolsey

The building which today houses the Real Food Cafe was once a struggling Little Chef. Sarah Heward and Steve Wolsey had been visiting the area for many years when they found it was for sale in 2004. They were soon convinced that this was the place for them to establish their dream of a high quality, locally sourced cafe and give up life in the City of London. After months of planning the conversion began, with a new open plan cooking area, and a huge central table to foster the atmosphere of shared eating. The cafe duly opened in 2005 to national acclaim. Late in 2005 Sarah and Steve celebrated their wedding in style with their families, friends, their team from the Real Food Cafe and liberal doses of fish and chips and champagne. However, their dream was shattered when Steve died very suddenly and unexpectedly on Sunday 21st May 2006 at 10.30pm. He was immensely proud of the cafe and the wonderful team, who have all been an fantastic source of support to Sarah as she has found her feet again. Today, the cafe continues Sarah and Steve's dream, the team now being led by the general manager Andrew Boden alongside Sarah, Julie, Marta and Frank. We continue to serve you as well as we possibly can in Steve's honour.