A sourcing tool for a pub that wants nothing imported on the menu.
The Farmer’s Dog does it, which is how we know exactly how hard it is. This is the list of what you have to give up, what you have to substitute, and the seven suppliers that do most of the work.
The rule is easy to say and expensive to keep.
Every ingredient from these islands. Not "British where possible", not "British meat", not "locally sourced where available" — every ingredient, including the ones nobody thinks of.
The ones nobody thinks of are what break it. Black pepper. Vanilla. Olive oil. Lemons. Rice. Coffee. Chocolate. Vinegar made from wine. Most mustard. Most of the tinned tomatoes in every kitchen in the country.
A kitchen that adopts this rule loses roughly a third of its existing dishes in the first week and finds substitutes for about half of those. The other half do not come back.
What goes, and what replaces it.
| You lose | Because | What we use instead |
|---|---|---|
| Lemons | Nothing citrus grows commercially here | Cider vinegar, gooseberry, sorrel, rhubarb |
| Black pepper | A tropical vine | Horseradish, mustard, watercress, alexanders |
| Olive oil | Wrong latitude by about a thousand miles | Cold-pressed rapeseed, which behaves differently and needs a lower heat |
| Rice | Grown here only as a curiosity | Pearl barley, spelt, potatoes |
| Tinned tomatoes | British tomatoes exist but not at that price or season | Roasted British tomatoes in season, and nothing at all in February |
| Coffee | No | Nothing. The pub serves tea, and the tea is not British either — it is honest about that |
| Chocolate | Cacao does not grow at this latitude | Honey, treacle, damson, blackcurrant |
| Balsamic vinegar | Italian, by definition | Cider vinegar and reduced apple juice, which is not the same and does not pretend to be |
Seven suppliers that do most of the work.
Five of the seven are inside sixteen miles of the farm shop. The other two are not, and do not need to be — the sixteen-mile condition governs the farm shop, not a pub in another county.
- Enstone Meat Co Oxfordshire Beef, pork, sausage and bacon Butcher
- Wychwood Dairy Oxfordshire Milk, cream and cultured butter Dairy
- Bruern Mill Oxfordshire Stoneground flour for bread and pastry Miller
- Dean Market Garden Oxfordshire Salad, roots and brassicas in season Market garden
- Windrush Smokery Oxfordshire Smoked fish, bacon and salt Smokery
- A Lincolnshire rapeseed crusher Lincolnshire Cold-pressed rapeseed oil, the olive oil substitute Oil
- A Kent orchard and vinegar house Kent Cider vinegar, the acid that replaces lemons Vinegar
This is a sourcing tool for other people’s pubs. Nothing on it is exclusive to this estate and we take no commission on any of it.
All-British, against the alternatives a landlord actually has.
| All-British | British meat only | Local where possible | No policy | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ingredients audited | Every one | Meat and poultry | Spot checks | None |
| Dishes lost in week one | About a third | Almost none | None | None |
| Menu rewrites a year | Four, minimum | One | One | One |
| Food cost change | +8 to +14% | +2 to +5% | +1 to +3% | 0 |
| Defensible in a sentence | ||||
| Survives a supplier failing | ||||
| Coffee on the menu |
What landlords ask before they try it.
You can, and most people should. The bar menu is the hard one because of the mixers and the garnishes. A Sunday menu is much easier and is the sensible place to start.
Eight to fourteen per cent on a typical gastropub basket in our experience, most of it in oil, dairy and out-of-season vegetables. Some of that comes back in what you can charge, and not all of it.
Easier than the food, up to a point. British beer, cider, gin, vodka and increasingly good wine all exist. Tonic is fine. The quinine in it is not British and never has been, which is the sort of detail that decides whether you mean this or not.
No. Nothing on this site takes payment and this page is a tool rather than a product. If it stops a landlord making the mistakes we made, it has done its job.
Order the estate’s side of it.
Cases, kegs and trade terms for licensees.
Elsewhere on the estate.
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