Electricity and gas for restaurants, pubs, hotels, and catering businesses. Energy is the highest-value non-food operational cost for most hospitality operators — and the one most consistently renewed on autopilot at above-market rates. This pool aggregates operator demand for fixed-rate annual contracts that individual venues can never negotiate alone.
A 50-cover restaurant consuming 85,000 kWh of electricity and 40,000 kWh of gas annually might pay £18,000–26,000 on energy in a typical year. A hotel with commercial kitchen, laundry, and heating will spend considerably more. In both cases, the contract was almost certainly last reviewed when the current tariff was set up — and has been auto-renewing, with annual price adjustments the supplier controls, ever since.
The business energy market is genuinely competitive. Multiple licensed suppliers actively seek hospitality contracts. But they compete for volume, and a single restaurant's consumption is marginal to a business energy supplier. A pool of 30–50 hospitality operators aggregating their consumption creates a contract worth tendering seriously for — and the pricing it commands reflects that.
Electricity for kitchens, refrigeration, lighting, HVAC, bar equipment, and extraction. Gas for cooking, heating, and hot water. Pool purchasing is structured as annual contracted supply — each operator receives their own contract with the winning supplier at the pool negotiated rate. There is no shared liability and no minimum commitment beyond the standard contract term.
IQ reviews each operator's consumption data before the tender to ensure accurate specification. Suppliers compete on a like-for-like basis — same tariff structure, same contract terms — so the comparison is genuine, not obscured by structural differences between offers.