Best Pub Employer at The Publican Awards 2025
‘Happy Days’
Oh, what a night! Today, we are grinning from ear to ear because last night we scooped a major industry award - Best Pub Employer at The Publican Awards - the UK hospitality industry’s Oscars! The awards ceremony was hosted by top TV presenter Claudia Winkleman.
This is simply massive for us, reflecting all the work which has gone into building our business over the last 29 years, ever since dad first saw an opportunity in a little rundown pub on the Norfolk coast in 1996, to what it is today. His ambitions then were to cook good food without pretension, have a little fun and make people happy along the way. Well, we’ve been shortlisted for Best Premium Food offering three times on the bounce now, including this year, winning on two previous occasions, and now we’ve scooped the biggest people award in the industry. We are cock-a-hoop!
The award is in recognition of the business that has created an ‘excellent working environment for employees including comprehensive training, strong staff motivation and benefits, and a clear and meaningful career path and development structure for our employees’. Well, we’ll take that.
None of this would have been possible without our phenomenal family – our Front of House teams, Kitchen teams, back-office and of course our people team who in many ways have been the architects of this victory. This award has your fingerprints all over it. Well done and thank you ACI teams.
Will Chew, Head of People and Culture, Anglian Country Inns said:
“It’s incredible for everyone at ACI to be recognised in this way. We know that we’re on a journey to always improve the working conditions and lives of our people. When ACI started 29 years ago, caring for the team was at the forefront of everyone’s mind, today the ACI values, and culture they help to create, are just as important, and will be for the foreseeable future. We’re really proud to be recognised for this award, entering always helps us with a blueprint for the next phase of improvement and we love learning from all the other great businesses out there.
We know we’re not perfect, but we also know that we are quite good at supporting managers and creating places where people can be themselves, learn some valuable life skills which make people happy and enable our teams to grow as people. We might just take a minute or two to grab a glass of fizz with the team and enjoy this moment. We think we know a venue or two that might be just the ticket.”
Thank you all for your support in helping us build this dream and we look forward to serving you in one of our wonderful establishments soon. In the meantime, if you know anyone that may wish to join our family, we have some great roles live right now you can find below.
