George Clooney put the Edinburgh cafe with a mission to help the homeless on the map. So what comes next?
When you have somehow lured George Clooney into your sandwich shop, what do you do for an encore? Well, if you’re Josh Littlejohn, co-founder of Social Bite, a chain of five cafes in Scotland, you look down the list of other recent Oscar winners and invite Leonardo DiCaprio. News leaked in June that DiCaprio had accepted and he is due to arrive in Edinburgh next month as the guest speaker at the Scottish Business Awards, one of Littlejohn’s sidelines. Meanwhile, the very strange story of Social Bite, a social enterprise that employs homeless people and donates all its profits to charity, becomes ever more like a Hollywood movie script.
For Clooney’s visit to Social Bite, last November, crowds formed outside the Rose Street shop at 6am. By the time his car pulled up, there was hysteria. He swept in, took selfies with the staff, bought an avocado and pesto sandwich and donated £1,000.
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