Dean Kelly on his ‘Mugg & Bean On The Move’ venture

Food pumps through Dean Kelly’s veins and it’s been this way since he can remember. It’s one of the toughest businesses to step into, but he’s made a meal of it. Kelly is a regular at the Woodmead Value Mart parking lot. That’s where his most recent venture resides. It’s a Mugg & Bean On The Move, in a container, slap bang between shopper’s cars.

Dean’s first job after finishing school was for the legendary restaurateur Ben Filmalter, the genius behind the original Mugg & Bean concept as well as some of Johannesburg, and indeed South Africa’s most famous, respected and loved restaurants.

Filmalter’s string of legendary eateries included Baccarat in Rosebank and Linger Longer amongst many others.

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Leipoldts was a silver-service restaurant that served a fine dining South African menu. This is where Dean first waited on customers for several years before heading off to don a uniform and complete his national service.

He returned to the Filmalter stable two years later and joined Fat Franks, a cajun-style diner in Braamfontein.

Kelly said: “I have always been involved in the restaurant business.” Even when he went overseas after a couple of years at Fat Franks, he made his living abroad the same way.

When he returned home, Kelly was back at Filmalter’s: “I moved back to Johannesburg and joined Ben Filmalter again. He had just started franchising Mugg & Bean in Gauteng. The first store we opened was Mugg & Bean Killarney. I was only planning on working for a short while with Ben as I wanted to go overseas.”

But a second sortie beyond our borders never happened.

He said: “Seven years later I was still working for Mugg & Bean franchising in various capacities.”

His entrepreneurial spirit crept up on him and the bug finally bit.

Kelly shared: “In 2006, I left Mugg & Bean franchising and opened my own Mugg & Bean store in Midrand. In 2008, we opened Mugg & Bean Woodmead. In 2016 we opened in Dainfern shopping centre.

“In 2018, we opened our first Mugg & Bean On The Move in the Woodlands office park in Woodmead. Thereafter we opened two satellite stores, one in the Waterfall office park in Midrand and the other in a container in the Woodmead Value Mart Centre.”

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Kelly reckons part of the franchise’s success is its sandwiches.

He said that the secret lies in the fillings, and that’s what makes the brand’s sarmies different and distinctive. Mugg & Bean launched at the genesis of South Africa’s coffee culture.

Running so many stores, keeping customers happy and managing staff is taxing work. But Kelly loves every bit of it.

“It’s a lot of hard but rewarding work. An eatery encompasses a whole range of business practices in one single business entity. There is ordering, stock control, storing, manufacturing, cleaning, serving, marketing, human resources and so on and so forth. All these need to be consistently managed and maintained every day.”