It can sometimes feel as though we’re always busy, which is the perfect excuse for lazy cooking or a reliance on ready meals. In winter, the last thing most of us want to do is to rouse ourselves from the couch and browse the local market for interesting produce.
Thankfully, savvy small businesses have cashed in on the human instinct to hibernate. Online-only food businesses are now delivering boxes
of fresh vegetables, meat, fish and spices to customers’ doors across the UK, and it’s now possible to get a next day delivery of Devonshire cream tea if you’re in Aberdeen, or Arbroath smokies in Bournemouth.
Starting a food box business was a no-brainer for Deborah Trott. Based on the edge of Dartmoor, Trott’s baker is across the road (she collects the scones fresh every morning), and the farm where she gets her clotted cream is just a few miles away. Her business Delimann delivers Devonshire cream teas to the rest of the UK, but she started out selling a variety of deli products. “The venture kicked off pretty quickly, because my business partner already owned a deli, so it was just a question of putting things up online,” she says. “After a few months we realised that 80% of customers were buying cream teas. We decided to specialise.”
Trott never considered setting up a bricks-and-mortar store. “Going online meant we had greater reach,” she says. “We tried to send some cream tea to Barbados once, but when it was delivered the postmistress there was on holiday so we decided to stick to the UK.”
The story was different for Goodness Direct, a wholefoods business founded in the 70s. General manager Lesley Cutts explains: “We began as a shop. We had nine bricks and mortar stores but then other businesses began to ask us to send them packages of specialised wholefood products. By the late 90s we went online to help cater for people on special diets who were unable to get their food or products anywhere else.”
She explains how the business grew with online retailing, and blossomed with the expansion of the fair trade and organic movements. “We now have 60 people working with the company, but we’re a co-operative, so everyone is paid the same and feels a similar responsibility for the business.”
Gousto is a food box that encourages busy professionals to expand their cooking repertoire. Founders Timo Schmidt and James Carter decided to launch online-only after realising that the costs of renting premises for a recipe shop in London were prohibitive. “Online just made sense,” says Schmidt. “Online industry is growing by 20-30% each year and it’s currently a £10bn online grocery market. I suppose we’ve taken advantage of this, and it’s been a blessing in disguise really.”
Along with sending out recipes and fresh spices, Gousto also provides fresh vegetables so consumers have every element of the meal delivered and ready to cook.
Schmidt says: “It’s really important if you’re setting up an online food business not to underestimate the amount of time and energy you need to invest in food regulations. Developing relationships with suppliers takes a large amount of time – we spend about 80-90% of our time visiting suppliers; it’s really important to treat them nicely, visit the farm, check everything is how you want it to be.”
Packaging is also a key consideration. Trott explains that the scones are baked early in the morning and then they’re cooled and sealed. “The jams are obviously non-perishables. But then we have to place the clotted cream in insulated containers to make sure it stays fresh,” she says.
When starting a food business, spotting a gap in the market is essential. Schmidt says: “We market at busy professionals, and when we launched, we were surprised by the age of our customers, compared to our predictions. We thought they would be younger, and we were also surprised by how large the female share is (70%). We had assumed it would be a little more level. Yet, our customer base all share the following common denominators: they were stressed, had no time, and wanted to eat a better quality food.”
For Trott, the biggest challenge to being online-only was trying to be heard above the big hamper companies. “We decided to use social media sites like Twitter to be heard, but we also sent out products to big companies. As a result, we’ve catered for the National Theatre and Virgin. It’s a great gift for a corporate event.”
One of the difficulties with being online-only is the lack of direct customer interaction, but Trott says she gets a lot of phonecalls from customers. “50% of our customers are repeat, and often they just want to chat, so while we’re this size, we have a nice relationship with those people.”
Lesley Cutts at Goodness Direct feels the same: “The biggest challenge of being online was missing that customer interaction. Obviously we had nine shops before and the chat is great in store. But now we do use social media, Twitter, and we get out as much as we can to allergy shows. Most of our referrals are word of mouth, and we do get a chance to interact with our customers, which is great.”
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