A LEADING pizza takeaway chain could soon be on the menu at a vacant café in the heart of Hawick, it has emerged.

The Almond Tree Cafe, a pioneering Borders community café which supported more than 150 vulnerable people over eight years, ceased trading at the end of last year.

The decision to close the outlet at 71 High Street was taken with great reluctance by trustees of the charity at an extraordinary meeting on Monday, November 28.

But in the end a failure to attract sufficient mature volunteers to work alongside and support the paid staff, together with spiralling costs, meant closure of the venture became inevitable.

Now it is emerged that Wolverhampton-based DPSK Ltd, the operators of Domino’s pizza chain, want to move into the vacant premises and have submitted a change of use planning application to Scottish Borders Council.

The application includes a report on the proposed ventilation system that would be installed at the premises.

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The report say the proposed operation would produce approximately 100 meals on average per day.

Jenni Green, chair of the trustees for the Almond Tree Cafe, spoke in December last year of her pride at what it had achieved.

She said: “We were there to help vulnerable people find employment. People who did struggle to find work for various reasons, many of them social reasons, and we’ve had a lot of people who have come through the cafe that have been in that position.

“The cafe has been able to provide a family atmosphere, and within that atmosphere people have begun to recover from some of the traumas they have been through.”

US-founded pizza powerhouse Domino’s operates a total of almost 20,000 restaurants worldwide.

Today, there are more than 1,200 Domino’s stores across the UK and Republic of Ireland, delivering more than 106 million hand-crafted pizzas a year.

Domino’s currently has an outlet in Channel Street, Galashiels.