Gourmet Leaves is a family lettuce farm navigating a new path for their business. With lots of help from their young toddler apprentices and amazing support from their community, Kate Monk describes how her family is trying to find their way through the crisis.
Thinking back to the summer of 2019, with our baby daughter aged one, we decided that it was time to look at expanding our lettuce farm. We were all getting more sleep and the children more independent. So, we invested thousands of pounds and man hours into building new growing systems, creating relationships with new customers and planned on our first triple sized harvest for the last week of March 2020. Well, you can see where this is going!
Like so many businesses, 90% of our customer base was wiped out overnight with the closure of the pubs and cafes. The initial shock left us feeling pretty bleak and the hope of outlets that had previously shown interest proved unsuccessful due to their own panic, reorganising and lack of time to speak with us.
Luckily in the first week our much-loved farm shops tripled their orders, so the immediate panic eased. But with more lettuce than we know what to do with we are slowly growing a new business plan.
Using what we already have on site: a large barn/ work area, a large delivery van, refrigeration and newly found time thanks to the loss of our back up jobs; we have decided to try bringing our lettuce straight from the farm to the consumers door in the form of a salad box scheme.
We have just completed our first week of deliveries and have definitely learned a huge amount in our usual fashion - the hard way. But we are feeling positive about the future and are constantly tweaking the plans around the constructive feedback we are getting. It has been lovely to actually meet our end consumer, something we have never been able to do before and we are definitely going to be able to offer a better package thanks to their much-valued support. Getting it right is so important to us. We really do care and we really are listening!
When people ask what the future holds for us I can honestly say I have no idea! But our salad box scheme, using our lettuce as a core, has proven really popular and we are hoping to build on these foundations for a sustainable future. As the growing season progresses we hope to incorporate more local produce (and our own which was planted in a panic a few days before lockdown) into the bags in addition to our own Gourmet Leaves lettuce. When the Covid restrictions are lifted a plastic free version, with Tupperware top ups from each home, would be amazing. But for now, it’s week by week and trying to keep it manageable, so that our stress levels are not too high as we still have the farm to run and our small children home safely with us “helping”.
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