Eat ‘N’ Go Limited, leading franchisee for world class food brands, Domino’s Pizza, Cold Stone Creamery and Pinkberry Gourmet Frozen Yoghurt, has reached a total of 100 outlets in Nigeria. This comes after the organisation re-opened its Yaba outlet recently following a refurbishment of the store to better serve its customers and students within the environs.
The company commenced operations on August 12, 2012, with the opening of its Saka Tinubu store with Domino’s Pizza and Cold Stone Creamery, which received instant validation form the market. From its humble beginnings, the company has since further expanded to several regions across the country, including Port Harcourt, Abuja, Enugu, Ilorin, Akure and Ibadan, offering best quality, delicious and mouth-watering pizzas, ice cream and frozen yoghurt.
The 100th store opening comes as a combination of all Domino’s Pizza, Cold Stone Creamery and Pinkberry Gourmet Frozen Yoghurt outlets in operation across Nigeria. Eat ‘N’ Go has continued to reinforce its commitment to extend premium satisfaction to its customers across Nigeria while providing easy access to its products throughout the country.
Mr. Patrick McMichael, CEO of Eat ‘N’ Go Limited, expressed his delight and gratitude to all employees, customers, partners and the public for their loyalty and continued support over the years.
“We are excited to be celebrating the opening of our 100th store in Nigeria. This is a huge accomplishment for us, especially because we achieved this in seven years. We are also grateful to the operating environment for helping us excel in our business even in the midst of challenges. We have experienced goodwill from staffs, and particularly our customers who have been there for us, as we continue to grow as a quick service restaurant in Nigeria.
“It is amazing to see how far we have come within a relatively short period. This is a milestone we are happy to celebrate. Throughout this period, we will be appreciating all our customers with lots of freebies and amazing promos. We are excited to continue the unique service we deliver to Nigerians,” he said.
Within its seven years in Nigeria, Eat ‘N’ Go has invested in human capital development, with over 2,120 staffers across its outlets, contributing greatly to Nigeria’s employment market. The organisation, as part of its corporate social responsibility, has also partnered with Slum2School Africa, a volunteer-driven developmental organisation that provides quality education to disadvantaged children, to send 1,000 children from slum communities to school in Nigeria. Dedicated proceeds from Domino’s Pizza Nigeria, Cold Stone Creamery and Pinkberry Gourmet Frozen Yoghurt are donated to the organisation through the Eat ‘N’ Go foundation to fund the initiative.
FirstBank’s gospel of kindness: Curbing animosity, stimulating one Nigeria
The word ‘kindness’ sounds simple but within its ordinariness lies the key to compassion, happiness, friendliness, peacemaking and, most importantly, helpfulness. Imagine a world without kindness. Short of kindness, wickedness would prevail; there would be a backlash of vengeance and war. A little act of the unkindness has caused families, businesses, societies and nations to crumble as dislike, disunity, disinterest, disrespect as well as disloyalty become the order of the day.
Dearth of kindness at individual levels may have contributed to the incessant killings in Nigeria. Corruption, kidnapping, robberies could be traced to deficiency of kindness for one another and our country, Nigeria.
Kindness is deep-seated in human existence. Everyone is a beneficiary of kindness at infancy. We are thrust into the world as newborns and nurtured into adulthood through steadfast kindness of our parents or guardians. According to Christians, at the creation of the world, God prompted His people to be kind. One of the commandments of God, “Love your neighbour as yourself,” is primarily a deed of kindness and testament to the fact of kindheartedness. Till date, kindness is the powerhouse of most religious beliefs, but kindness goes beyond religion. It is everything and applicable to everyone, all tribes, all spheres of life and all nations.
Kindness relieves suffering and promotes well-being of families, businesses, societies and nations.
Businesses appreciate kindness. Corporate social responsibility (CSR) was borne out of the business culture of kindness deliberately designed and rendered to its stakeholders. But some schools of thought are of contrary views that CSR is a self-centred gesture delivered by corporate organisations to selfishly gain more customer loyalty and in the long run make more profit.
However, in today’s socially-conscious environment, employees and customers place a premium on working for and spending their money with businesses that prioritise CSR, which is now an evolving business practice that incorporates sustainable development into a company’s business model. It has a positive impact on social, economic and environmental factors.
But FirstBank’s act of kindness is far beyond CSR. It is a two-pronged approach of doling out corporate philanthropy and promoting kindness. Titled SPARK, an acronym for Start Promoting Acts of Random Kindness, and armed with a declaration tagged “The Kindness Manifesto,” it is capable of melting the hard-hearted to compellingly embrace the act of kindness.
The manifesto is centred around a core message of collective responsibility of incorporating the smallest acts of kindness in our everyday life. Better described as a creed, it is a formal summary of the bank’s belief of kindness.
It states thus: “ We believe kindness should be endless.
We believe everyone deserves to be treated with civility, compassion and respect and that love should be expressed every day through acts of kindness and generosity.
We believe everyone should be greeted with a smile, because everyone deserves a ray of sunshine in their day.
We believe we can build a world filled with kindness. All it takes is for each of us to be a little kinder every day. Every thoughtful act is another building block in building a better, warmer, kinder world.”
FirstBank’s kindness campaign has been on for almost two years, but it not too clear how much it has impacted on Nigerians. First Bank of Nigeria Limited initiated the kindness scheme in 2017 when it introduced the annual Corporate Responsibility and Sustainability (CR&S) Week programme.
The maiden FirstBank CR&S week, themed “Promoting Kindness; Putting You First,” witnessed the culmination and consolidation of the bank’s interventions in social responsibility,promoting random acts of kindness across communities in the six geo-political zones of Nigeria and FirstBank subsidiaries in the United Kingdom and sub-Saharan Africa. According to FirstBank, the project is a reflection of its brand promise to always put its customers first while it reinforces the Bank’s role in driving sustainable development in the communities where it operates.
The CR&S week is specially designed to reignite acts of kindness in our society and the events are tailored towards re-orientating the society along the right values; encouraging the citizenry to intentionally create positive impact in their immediate environment. One of the major highlights of the week has been the SPARK initiative. The week-long activities held so far in 2017 and 2018 saw FirstBank’s employees give their time and resources to promote random acts of kindness within their communities, driving welfare through giving and visits to orphanages/less privileged homes and IDPs.
FirstBank’s CR&S Week is the first of its kind in the financial service industry in Nigeria and it has successfully spotlighted the bank’s corporate citizenship interventions to drive positive impact across various communities.
The bank’s kindness campaign is encouraging people everywhere to step out of their comfort zones, perform a random act of kindness, post a picture and tag FirstBank on social media.
According to the bank’s group head, marketing and corporate communications, Folake Ani-Mumuney, the CR&S week was mooted to stimulate a better society with random acts of kindness: “As an institution, we want to encourage the values of random kindness and we implore Nigerians and indeed everyone to go the extra mile to promote and celebrate kindness this week. Kindness does not have to be monetary but would always leave us with a better society we can all be proud of.”
FirstBank’s gospel of kindness is a worthy cause. It’s also quite timely. The Nigerian state is passing through a very tough time occasioned by so many problems preventing the country from moving forward. Its gamut of problems that range from corruption, poor economy, insecurity, to political and ethnical differences can be reasonably resolved through acts of kindness that inspire understanding, love and care for one another.
The acts of killing and destruction of property by suspected Fulani herdsmen has elements of hatred whose key antidote is kindness. There is a need for Nigerians, irrespective of their religious backgrounds, to embrace and co-habit in a peaceful manner to end this bloodshed. People claim that the killings have political undertones, but you don’t play politics with the lives of human beings, not if you are kindhearted.
This is indeed a very difficult time in the history of Nigeria, especially with the continuous bloodshed. It is so barbaric, so unbelievable that in a nation with government, things like this will continue to happen with reckless abandon. Some people say that it is a matter of politics, but I say that it is a matter of animosity occasioned by intolerance of political and ethnic differences. If only we would yield to FirstBank’ SPARK, this butchery would be resolved in our respective individual families and at community levels from where this violence brews. After all, individuals make up family units that, put together, create nations.