Supplying.
Everyone who sells us something, everyone we sell to, and the mark on the door that says we have actually been and looked. The farm shop may only stock what is grown, reared or made within sixteen miles of it, which turns a sourcing policy into a small, dense, extremely local economy.
The radius is a planning condition, not a slogan
The goods sold in the farm shop are limited to those produced, grown or reared on Diddly Squat, or within a sixteen-mile radius of it. That is a West Oxfordshire District Council planning condition, not a marketing line, and we treat it as binding. Everything in this chapter is downstream of that single sentence: it decides who can supply the shop, what the shelves can hold, and why a perfectly good Yorkshire cheese will never be in it.
The four things this chapter does.
The sixteen-mile marketplace
Thirteen producers inside the radius, where they are, what they make and what we sell of theirs.
Backed by Diddly Squat
A standard, an audit and a public register. Two of the twelve holders are currently lapsed and you can see…
Trade and wholesale
Pubs, chefs and licensees, ordering by the case rather than the jar.
Fair-price storefronts
A direct-to-customer shop for a farm that does not want to build one, at a rate that leaves the grower…
The arithmetic of a sixteen-mile shop.
Why a supplier list is worth publishing at all.
-
Most shops will not tell you who makes their food.
Ask an ordinary retailer who made a thing on its shelf and you will get a brand, a country of origin if you are lucky, and a customer services address. The maker is a commercial secret, because knowing the maker is how a buyer gets undercut and how a customer works out the margin.
A farm shop that trades on provenance and then hides its provenance is doing the thing it is selling against. If sixteen miles matters, the sixteen miles have to be nameable.
Provenance you cannot check is a font choice.
-
Publishing it is also a discipline.
The moment a supplier list is public, every shelf card has to survive somebody reading both. That is how we found out we had been describing Burford-smoked Hampshire trout as coming from the Windrush, and how we found out our blankets were not made from our own sheep.
Both of those were corrected because a list existed to check the claim against. Neither would have been corrected otherwise.
-
And it makes the constraint legible.
Sixteen miles sounds generous until you draw it. Inside that circle there is no citrus, no rice, no coffee, no chocolate, no olive oil and no tea. There is one dairy, one mill, one wool mill and no fishmonger at all.
A shopper who can see the list can see the gaps, which is a much better answer to "why do you not sell lemons" than a paragraph of marketing about terroir.
Everything else in here.
Group buying
Fifty farms buying fertiliser as one buyer, and the two ways that goes wrong.
All-British sourcing
A tool for a landlord who wants a menu with nothing imported on it.
Chefs and restaurants
Whole carcasses, gluts and the standing Tuesday call.
White label
Our suppliers, your label, and the reasons we mostly say no.
Brand licensing
What the name is worth, what it costs to lend, and what it costs to get back.
Farm software
Not another farm management information system. The market already has plenty.
Creator storefronts
A shop for somebody with an audience and no warehouse.
Farms abroad
What travels, what does not, and why most of it does not.
Returnable packaging
Deposits, return rates, and the sixty per cent of glass bottles we lost.
Collection lockers
Nine points at taprooms and partner pubs, because a locker in a pub is a pub visit.
Shared last mile
The single most dangerous idea in the catalogue, and why we have said so.
Digestate and feedstock
A listing service beside somebody else’s digester, and nothing more.
The list we did not have.
For four years this estate sold provenance without publishing a supplier list. The shelf cards named a village, the website named a county, and anybody who wanted to check had nothing to check against.
That is not a scandal. It is the ordinary way retail works, and there are decent commercial reasons for it. But a business whose entire proposition is "we know where this came from" is the one business that cannot hide behind those reasons.
So this chapter is the list, with the audit dates, the lapses and the failures attached. It is less flattering than the version without them, and considerably more useful.
- Published
- Every producer, named
- Audit dates
- Both directions
- Lapses
- Shown, not hidden
When a producer joins or leaves.
One email when the marketplace changes — a new maker, a lapsed mark, or a line we have stopped stocking and why. It is a dull email and it is the one people in the trade read.
- New producers inside the radius
- Register changes, including lapses
- Trade ordering windows, for licensees
