Happerley Board Meeting and the NFU

Welcome back to another blog. This week it’s all about food. More importantly what we are doing and how we can do more to showcase local suppliers and products. This also links to our work with Happerley to ensure consumers get transparency about the origin of their food.

Team Talk Special Edition

You will by now all have received a special edition of Team Talk at home. This was a one off edition which I hope you all enjoyed and I am grateful to all colleagues who gave their time to feature in it and to those who produced it. We wanted to send this to every colleague to tell them about Our Connected Future and this new website, Colleagues Connect. One of the biggest challenges facing the business is how we communicate with nearly 9,000 colleagues across over 500 operating sites working at different times. The idea of this website is to ensure colleagues give and receive information on a more interactive and immediate basis. This will help to save us money, communicate more effectively and eradicate the need for printed communications altogether, helping the environment.

Happerley Board Meeting

This blog begins with the Happerley Advisory Board Meeting. Their Head Office is on a farm in Gloucester; luckily we weren’t interrupted by any wildlife, although that could have made for an interesting meeting. 

The Happerley Board

You may remember that in my 'Countryfile Live’ blog  I spoke about the work that Happerley do and the fact we have recently made the Happerley accreditation mandatory across all of our Best of Our Counties range. It’s been really interesting to see some of the outcomes of this, and it is something that I am very positive about. During our meeting we spoke about the challenge Happerley face encouraging suppliers and producers to be open and honest about where their produce has come from and how we can overcome this. We are keen to ensure we work with our suppliers to assist them in signing up. Not only do consumers have the right to know where their produce has come from, but this stance will also benefit honest suppliers and put them on a more level playing field. We are ensuring that the promise we make to our customers about where their food has originated from is honest and that when we say something is local, it really is.

There are a lot of exciting things happening with Happerley at the moment. They are in the process of developing version two of their app, where consumers can scan QR codes, linked to the suppliers Happerley account, to see where the product they are purchasing has originated from. They are also looking to challenge the food industry to turn transparent on a wider scale, and are looking to introduce Transparency Champions who are partners that will promote the work that Happerley do. It’s a really exciting, growing business and I am really passionate about us being the first UK retailer involved with Happerley, for the benefit of both our suppliers and customers. 

Educating the Coop Childcare way #foodroots 

Coop Childcare is continuing to embrace the role we play in supporting the health of future generations and connecting children to food origins. The project to capture food provenance educational programmes together with producing ‘feedmetruth’ menus across all of our nurseries is progressing well. We are producing a syllabus full of learning opportunities including introducing ‘all year round’ allotments or growing areas in all of our nurseries so children learn about how food is grown, harvested and produced. We’ll also offer trips to local bakeries, supermarkets, green groceries and farms where they can talk about different foods and we’ll be reinforcing food education back at home; encouraging families to cook together and providing recipes on our new website.   

Showcasing local produce

I met with Will Frazer, the County Adviser at the National Farmers’ Union (NFU) for Gloucestershire, to discuss the Future of Food project and to ask Will for his support with this. We are developing the Future of Food project because we believe there should be more opportunities for start-ups, entrepreneurs and existing producers who want to diversify, to create new products. It is a ‘Dragon’s Den’ type scenario where we will call upon producers, farmers and start-ups to pitch new food innovations to a panel who will decide if the product could be successful. The innovations do not need to be end products, it’s all about developing new ideas. Those that are successful will have guaranteed shelf space in some of our stores, access to our in-house kitchens to trial products and will be able to test price and demand.

Gloucestershire has been decided as the trial county for the Future of Food project due to the wide variety and volume of food production. This event is not exclusive to Midcounties and we want to involve as many people in Gloucestershire to ensure that the Future of Food project can stimulate more local produce and encourage consumers to buy local. Will and I talked about the potential barriers that farmers face in creating new products as well as the challenges they face on a wider scale, in particular Brexit. Post EU control, there is a lot of concern around potential trade deals and whether the UK will have to commit to buy a certain amount of produce from abroad. This makes local produce and the transparency from Happerley even more important and paves the way for a number of opportunities to focus on local producers post Brexit.

Will is now a part of the group that develops the Future of Food idea and he will encourage NFU members to get involved. We want a bigger platform for local producers and if the Gloucestershire trial is a success, we will role this out across further trading areas. 

Will and I at our meeting

I’m going to leave this blog here, but I do look forward to talking more about our other businesses in future posts as I know this week has been very food-focused. Education on the provenance of our food and increasing transparency in the industry is something our consumers are becoming increasingly passionate about. Through our partnership with Happerley and by increasing the local produce we supply, we can achieve this. Not only will this meet the increasing expectations of our consumers but encouraging the supply and purchase of local food will also allow us to stand out against larger retailers.

CIT on the run!

Congratulations to all 13 CIT colleagues who got very muddy last weekend taking part in a Wolf Run. They showed true team spirit supporting each other throughout the gruelling 10k and finished as a team. It was a fantastic effort from everyone and well done for raising over £200 for one of our charity partners, Warwickshire Young Carers.

If you want to see the team take on the challenge you can watch their video here.

Make sure you leave a comment if there is anything you want to hear me discuss in future posts and I would love to hear any thoughts you have on this week’s blog.