Well, after years of consultancy between us, prompted by the loss of two local farms nearby, we wondered if we could take on the quite crazy business of on-line shopping for food, but for us it would have to be local food we were selling, as we were on a mission.
Between us we had been in the marketing, team building, partnership building, innovation and creativity world, facilitating, coaching, mentoring, running workshops, and basically dealing with the people to people business. It is a world of people and environment, not a lot to do with products and really not that much to do with fast lane services. By that I mean, it's one thing to have two weeks, well sometimes two days, to prepare for a group of people to work together, its quite another handling a customer interface that may last no more than 20 seconds. A different world, yes, we were facing a different world and a different game and it felt exciting.
We started thinking about all this early 2005, we knew there was a lot of work to do but probably had no idea how much. Our first thoughts were that the major hurdles would be working innovatively with primary producers, and working innovatively within a highly regulated and complex field.
For example, the farmers, as primary producers, are used to models of selling which entail large orders phoned through from pubs, restaurants, wholesalers and supermarkets, someone arranges the delivery and some time later they add up what they have sold and eventually get paid for it. Aware, as consultants, that every stage you add to a system adds costs (for handling and additional waste) we wanted to have a just in time, no stock no waste system. Just in time is a familiar idea in the work of manufacturing cars but pretty rare in primary producers where the main ‘just in time’ is "jam made just in time to get it to the local farmers market", but even this just in time is prior to an event of selling not after a sale - we wanted just in time after a sale. Very different.
The world of regulations was also much more complex than we had ever imagined, and full of rules which have evolved over centuries and are so often quite bizarre. For example, we do have on our web site that we sell meat from a particular farm, and that farm happens only to produce, in a fully certified way, organic meat. But, even though we only sell UK produce, in fact only produce from the South East, the regulations say that we cannot declare that our meat is organic or even from the UK - without paying someone something to inspect. We are guilty before being proven innocent and this is the rule in the market place here.
Regulations for chicken are different from game (e.g. Turkey, as that is classed as game) from beef, from lamb from pigs and so on.
And, we were perfectly aware that margins are tight in this business, prices are competitive, and the logistics a nightmare, so why would we do this?
I think this is where it fits with wanting to feel we were in an authentic business, and we are part of the countryside, and we see it changing, so if we can't bring our consultancy skills and knowledge together with a drive to make a difference, as they say, then who is going to bring back economic viability to country farms?
Our first six months of finding our first producers was a lot of fun and so interesting. "Hello, we are Farm Fresh Express, and we are not from the food business at all, we are consultants, and we want to start an on-line shopping service for local consumers to buy local produce, would you be willing to work with us?" Many told us they get approached several times a year with this idea or that, and maybe they get to a few weeks of business then they go bust. Often it never gets past the first discussions. Some producers did not want to know, some couldn't understand what we wanted to do, and it was not easy until we had our first web site up and a van with a proper logo professionally produced, and now we looked serious.
Building a web site required another level of innovation and fortunately a member of the family was in between University and a proper job, so he built the web site for us, and having looked at the standard packages available decided that none could meet the spec we required so it would have to be built from scratch, well, as much from scratch as you can, but building on the open source software available, and a world team of people willing to help. Without open source software it would not have been possible.
We launched in September and then found out that the weeks would fly by with little time to think, yet so much to do, autumnal themes followed by Halloween themes, followed by Xmas markets, followed by orders for Turkeys and Ducks and Hams and all to be added as quickly as possible into a web system with a back office system, with vouchers and offers and automatic purchasing and automatic receipt generation and and and, and more.
So the story has not ended yet, we are still going after more than six months, and we have hit what they call the hungry gap, with very little in the way of seasonal vegetables available while the supermarkets have aubergine and sweet potato and red snapper. But we keep going because our producers are finding we are making a difference, only to the smallest ones so far, but that's a start. And our customers give us such wonderful authentic feedback, like one dear lady said she no longer felt guilty about buying her week's food as she absolutely knows where every item comes from.
I think that is where we can be clear about being an authentic and moral business. Being ethical, being moral, requires knowledge to be out there and public and where anyone can authenticate it, not some paid official who makes that judgement for us all. On our web site everything is clear, even for the cauliflower you know which farm it comes from and the name of the farmer.
So, this is maybe how technology can move ethical choice in the other direction, where it can be about more than just price, because technology can connect what you want to and need to know with what is known so you can make that choice fully aware of your options.
If you have an comments on what we are trying to do, if you think you can help in any way - we need publicity to help us help others make those choices, then do get in touch. We think this is a eco-friendly way of getting food to people and with our compostible bags made of corn starch we have done everything we can to be as green as possible. Do you agree?
If we have done this for the food market then we can do this in other fields. Whether it is care for the elderly, care for the children, or care for the woods and parks and roads and buildings, building technology to provide access to local produce, services, knowledge, has surely got to be an authentic thing to do.
Graham Rawlinson
Director
Farm Fresh Express
0845 612 7070