If you sell catering equipment, you know the moment that decides whether a trade customer stays with you. It is not the sale. It is the week something they bought from you stops working in the middle of service.

Most retailers never get to watch that moment go well, because when protection is embedded, Loxa handles the claim end to end. The retailer only hears about it at the good moments: a replacement ordered, a customer coming back for more. So here is one of those claims, told in full. It exists because ECatering, the leading UK catering equipment retailer, embeds Loxa protection across its range, which meant the cover was already there when one of its trade customers needed it.

The customer every catering retailer wants

Mark Battle has been a hotelier all his working life. He is General Manager at the Ellen Kensington, a boutique hotel chain in London. Whose Lacquer Room restaurant is known for pairing British ingredients with bold Asian flavours, and he oversees the entire UK operations for a group whose properties stretch from Somerset to Singapore. He buys commercial kitchen equipment the way trade customers do: regularly, in volume, often over the phone.

He is also the last person who says yes to insurance. By his own account, he declines it on everything. Rental cars, company vehicles, add-ons of any kind. But when he ordered a commercial dishwasher, ECatering offered Loxa protection to him at the right moment, the point of purchase, the way they do on every insurable product they sell. He weighed what a failed machine costs a working kitchen, and, out of character, ticked the box.

The claim that never reached the retailer's support desk

But soon after the dishwasher installation, a circuit board failed.

Every catering retailer knows what this moment used to mean: a warranty dispute over parts and labour, an engineer to coordinate, a trade customer going cold. And on the customer's side, plates washed by hand at an extra person's wages, around £180 a day by Mark's pricing, plus a call-out and repair he knows runs to roughly £550.

None of that happened. Mark filed through Loxa's claims portal, and ECatering's involvement in the claim was the replacement order; a second sales for the business.

No excess. No engineer chased. No support ticket on the retailer's desk. His verdict on the process: "they made it very, very simple for me".

What one claim does to a trade account

Here is the part that matters commercially. Mark has since bought again from ECatering, with Loxa cover attached. He has instructed his teams across the group's properties to add protection to everything they order. Set against the value of the equipment a hotel runs on, and the cost of every day a machine sits broken, he sees covering everything as obvious.

He has also lived the alternative: a piece of equipment at another property failed just past its warranty, with a £780 part to show for it. That is the gap standard catering warranties leave, parts-only cover that expires quietly, and it is exactly the gap a retailer closes by embedding protection at the point of sale.

The maths for your store

One well-handled claim converted a lifelong decliner into a trade account that attaches protection to every order. Not one policy per sale: a buying habit across an estate of kitchens, with the settlement flowing back through the retailer as a replacement order. None of it happens unless the retailer puts the cover there in the first place. ECatering did, and the claim did the rest, at no cost to their support team, because Loxa handles it end to end.

Read how ECatering built protection into every sale in our dedicated retailer case study.
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