The fresh produce world is an exciting place to be – I’ve been with Abel & Cole for more than 10 years and I’m constantly inspired by the farmers, suppliers, growers and makers who help us to delight our customers every week. Fresh produce is at the heart of what we do at Abel & Cole. We’re an online organic delivery business with strong heritage, ethical values and a real love for organic.
We have some great relationships with our suppliers and together deliver some amazing seasonal organic fresh produce to our customers. But the world is ever changing and we must remain creative in our approach.
A few years ago we developed the UK’s first organic sweet potato with James Foskett near Woodbridge in Suffolk, and we continue to work with our farmers and growers on exciting produce. And we must keep this up.
But there is also a great opportunity for us as retailers to be creative with how we promote organic fresh produce too, and one of the main reasons I decided to write this column was to say thank you to all our great suppliers for their amazing creativity, but also to let them know that we’re working hard on their behalf to do what we can to grow the organic market with shoppers. It’s fair to say some things haven’t worked for us, but others definitely have.
We opened our first pop-up restaurant in London recently, bringing our business to life for customers who have historically only ever met our drivers, spoken with us on the phone and shared their photos with us on Facebook. We were open for one month, learned a lot and thoroughly enjoyed cooking great organic food for our customers and suppliers, and introducing our brand and our organic food to a many new people.
For us this was a really creative, worthwhile, thing to do. Seasonality is huge for us and our customers love it. We have a Surprise Surprise product on our website, giving customers the chance to have surprise organic products delivered to them, giving them something new to try. In the coming weeks we’ll be delivering these customers three tasty varieties of English apples from our grower, Mole End Farm in Kent. This again is quite a new and creative promotional activity for us.
We cannot be rigid with our approach; our minds must remain open and creative in our efforts to introduce more people to eat organic. Recipe boxes have taken the foodie world by storm in the past few years. Ours are fully organic and continue to evolve – this summer we introduced out Light Recipe Box for those counting the calories over the summer months. Our recent addition is our Student Recipe Box with all the organic ingredients to make a delicious veggie one-pot meal plus seasonal organic fruit. We were keen to introduce cooking and great organic fresh produce to a young audience, offering healthy eating options to students moving away from home, and so far the results are very encouraging.
If you’d suggested to me 10 years ago that we’d open a pop-up restaurant and deliver recipe boxes tailored specifically for students, I might have given you a funny look, but today they feel like a natural next step for us – so who knows what the next 10 years will see in fresh produce, but one thing is certain, creativity is key.
