FIRM FACTS

NAME: Lime Food Design

BUSINESS NATURE: Event Caterers

ESTABLISHED: 2006

LOCATION: Bridge Road, Littlehampton.

NUMBER OF EMPLOYEES: 54 permanent & 60 freelance staff

ANNUAL TURNOVER: Undisclosed

After only a few years in business, Lime Food Design has proved it can cater for a whole range of tastes.

The Littlehampton-based company, founded in 2006 by sisters Kathryn Seal and Nicola Simpson, has gone from strength to strength and has just served its largest client.

On Friday, Lime catered for a staggering 3,000 guests at an exclusive Elizabethan Ball held to mark the 450th anniversary of Westminster Abbey and School.

The £500,000 contract took 18 months of planning.

It involved 250 staff, including chefs, service and security, as well as 100 entertainers.

Among the guests were politicians and celebrities.

Only a few months after it was set up, the company was hired by the UK Surrealist Society to cater for its annual conference.

It was the perfect demonstration of the bespoke service that Lime offers its clients.

Ms Seal said: “We love doing this sort of thing.”

She and her sister were already both experienced event planners.

All Lime food is made from scratch using local produce whenever possible by head chef Kevin Love, who trained at Chichester College before working for several exclusive restaurants including under Gordon Ramsay at Royal Hospital Road and Claridge’s.

The company’s success has helped both Ms Seal and Ms Simpson reach the finals of the Grazia Magazine and O2 business women of the year awards as well as the shortlist for Sussex Business Award’s entrepreneur of the year. They are building on their achievements by branching out into running cafés, the first of which opened last summer.

Ms Seal said: “We were doing catering for the Cass Sculpture Foundation at Goodwood and even though it was a visitor attraction there was no café. So we thought we would run one for a few weeks to see how it went.”

Things went fantastically well and since then Lime has opened three more cafés, including inside the newly refurbished St Paul’scommunity centre in Worthing.

Ms Seal said: “It’s a great shop windowfor our food and we hope to open another four by next summer.”