Overnight, I had a question about our private client business. It was developed during the pandemic since restaurants were closed, and demand for food had exploded. Our production is somewhat unusual since we specialize in heirloom products, and therefore of limited interest to the general population. However, through their contact, our distributors (well there are two of them) said they could support up to 500 delivery per week mostly in large cities and specifically in areas where they already operate.
These are entirely the clients of our distributors, they selected them with their own criteria, and it also helps us greatly because sometimes we overproduce certain crops. Last summer we had a bumper crop of strawberries.
We produce 500 retail boxes per week, it may not sound like a lot, but it is. The bulk of our produce about 90% is for restaurants and hotel trade which have specific requirements. The meat side of the business was started by fluke after our second son (no reflection on the love and affection -- just a way of avoiding names), who developed as a winter project a functioning website for the sale and distribution of meats. It was not supposed to be live, but because of Covid...
The retail clients are also great for a massive reduction in food waste. Hotels and restaurants have very specific needs, and so any excess production would end up as waste because we only pick ripe fruits and vegetables. Selling to private clients reduces produce waste. Our goats had been fabulous at transforming waste greens into compost, but private clients have been a great source of economy, reducing produce waste was a dramatic revenue booster with literally no additional costs (aside from more boxes).
We don't have a breakdown of our private clients, because they are not our clients, they are the distributor's clients. I've been told that the majority are associated with the restaurant and hotel trade, which makes sense since they will appreciate the challenges of working with heirloom fruits and vegetables (There's even a private chat room that discusses cooking methods for some of our more unusual vegetables).
It takes about two years to integrate a new variety of fruits or vegetables into our growing cycle. There are several issues, the first is the flavour, sometimes there's a good reason a vegetable is no longer produced. We work with five chefs mostly in London, who like to experiment with new produces. We focus on those that fit the hotel and restaurant trade.
Note: I was asked if we needed a milk quota to produce our butter, and the answer was no! Milk quotas were eliminated in 2015. Again, we produce exclusively for hotels and restaurants and the cost of our butter is high, about twice what you would pay for supermarket butter.
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