Our story
Rue Consultancy was founded by business partners Gayle Appleby-Merry, Simon Pollard, Chris Stanley and James Stacey, with a clear focus: supporting the evolving needs of the Business and Industry sector across catering consultancy and facilities management services.
Deep Industry Expertise Across Catering & Facilities Management
Many organisations are not getting the value they should from their catering and facilities management services. Contracts are often left to run, performance is not challenged and opportunities to improve are missed.
Our team combines deep operational and consultancy experience across catering, foodservice and soft FM services. From managing complex global client portfolios to delivering consultancy across multiple sectors, we understand the realities organisations face.
Gayle has led large scale international accounts, while the wider team has played a key role in shaping catering and facilities management consultancy across diverse industries. This experience allows us to provide clear, independent insight and practical, commercially grounded solutions.
Current Insight. Practical Delivery. Commercial Focus.
We bring up to date industry insight together with real world operational experience. The result is consultancy that is both strategic and practical.
Our approach is grounded in how services operate day to day, helping organisations identify inefficiencies, benchmark performance and implement improvements that are commercially viable and sustainable.
Supporting Modern Workplace Environments
Rue Consultancy supports organisations across catering, foodservice and facilities management, bringing clarity, expertise and measurable impact to every project.
We work with clients across the UK and internationally, taking an independent and agile approach to improving performance, aligning services and delivering long term value.
“We created Rue Consultancy to offer a different perspective. Independent, honest and focused on what truly delivers value for our clients”.
Meet the team
Gayle Appleby-Merry
Managing Partner
Gayle is a founding partner of Rue Consultancy which was established in 2024 to work exclusively in the Business and Industry and Soft FM services sector.
After spending 30 years cross managing the UK and wider Catering and FM landscape Gayle felt it was time to take all of that knowledge and experience and put it to use developing solutions for clients that rather than operating for them…so took that leap and never looked back…
As a senior female leader, Gayle recently completed the 30% Moving Ahead programme for leading females in senior leadership roles.
With the challenges society faces in the forefront of her mind, she went on to complete a 2-year reverse mentoring programme for diversity and inclusion to promote and embrace differences and challenges faced by her team within ethnic minorities. Her role was to lead change linking employee experiences and requirements with the executive team of the world’s largest contract catering organisation to create long lasting change.
Our clients achieve their goals through her consultative approach and proven track record of establishing the right solution, focusing on achieving each client’s very specific objectives.
Gayles’ experience spans a wide variety of consultancy projects including foodservice strategy creation, competitive tendering and operational reviews. Her specialism is cross company project management, benchmarking and tendering workplace catering services, delivering operational and financial improvements for our top corporate clients.
Gayle has worked in contract catering since starting her career as a fully qualified Chef and then fast tracking into site and area management. Her career has seen time spent across almost all areas of the industry, including Soft FM, Education, Healthcare and B&I.
Simon Pollard
Managing Partner
Simon is a founding Partner of ISCC.
His career started out within the World renowned, French, Relais & Chateau business where he undertook his initial training to become a chef, from a successful time within the group Simon’s career moved out of hotels and into the contract catering arena. Where he enjoyed a continued path upwards and following a number of senior catering and facilities management positions with Sodexo, Simon moved into sales, becoming Sales Director for Sodexo’s prestigious Independent School division.
Having established himself as a major contributor to the industry his services were next, put to good use with a move to Avenance as Sales Director. That move led to continued success where latterly he was promoted to Managing Director for their Education and Healthcare division.
With a wealth of knowledge and experience Simon saw an opportunity to work with clients to really make a difference to the outsourced and in house consultancy market and so left to establish ISCC in 2007. Since setting up initially, ISCC has become the established market leader in the Independent Schools sector. This has given the business the platform it needed to attract further talent to its Senior Team and seen it organically grow a number of supporting arms to the portfolio of businesses.
Simon heads up ISCC’s Catering Consultancy portfolio.