For years, we thought being a good customer to our suppliers meant buying great ingredients from people whose work we admired. Order what we need, pay fairly, come back for more.
Over time, we realised that wasn’t enough. We also had to ask,
‘What do you need from us?’
Sometimes the answer is simple: a commitment to buy more of something, a little certainty about what we’ll need next year. Other times, it means developing a new recipe together, finding a home for something that might otherwise go to waste or offering our experience and knowledge to help solve a problem.
That question changed the relationship. Over time, it grew into what we now call our Craft Community: farmers, growers and makers we want to become better customers to, so their businesses and ours can grow together.
Many of them are small more vulnerable businesses, and that matters, so working well together can require a different kind of attention. Understanding what each producer needs, while finding a way for those needs to work comfortably within our own, has become a craft in itself. Sometimes it’s certainty, sometimes expertise, sometimes simply enough demand to make the next step possible.
With George at Daily Dose, we started with a shared dislike of seeing good food go to waste. Surplus and imperfect fruit and vegetables became juices, drinks and ingredients we could use in our kitchens. The more we worked together, the more uses we found for things that might otherwise have been left behind.
With our cheesemakers, close relationships mean conversations go beyond what we want to buy. When we learnt about the pieces left behind as large wheels of cheese are cut down, the question became: what else could they be? One answer was our Cheddar Cheese Crackers.
Small conversations begin to add up.
In the past 18 months, we’ve developed more than 50 new products with members of the Craft Community. More than 2,000 tonnes of surplus and imperfect produce have found a use. Ideas using cheese offcuts have saved 11 tonnes from going to waste. Together, we’ve supported the Natoora Farm Fund, while collaborations with our suppliers have raised almost £15,000 for charity.
And today, around 15p in every £1 we spend on ingredients goes to members of this community.
That’s important to us not because bigger is necessarily better, but because it suggests something about what growth can do. As we grow, we buy more. The interesting question is who we choose to buy from, and what our growth can make possible for them.
We talk about earning our right to grow by growing others. Here, that idea becomes very tangible. Our growth can give a small producer greater certainty, create demand for more of what they make, or give them the confidence to invest in what comes next. Their growth, in turn, gives us access to better ingredients, deeper knowledge and possibilities we couldn’t create alone.
The best producers shouldn’t have to become more conventional in order to grow. Perhaps the better challenge is for customers like us to become better at growing with them.
The Craft Community began with remarkable food and the people who make it. What we’ve learnt since is that finding great producers is only half the job.
We have to become the kind of customer they want to grow with.
