It’s Showtime!

Speciality Bites with

Paul Hargreaves

Chief executive of Cotswold Fayre

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It is nearly my favourite time of year again – the Speciality & Fine Food Show at Olympia.

I’m sitting here on Bank Holiday Monday wondering where the summer went – oh yes we moved the whole business seven miles down the road!

I’m now regretting the decision to have a holiday before the move, but it’s too late now – two shows and a supplier conference in the next three weeks and then the mayhem of Christmas!

Did you watch Dragon’s Den last night? As usual there was a food business featured. This week it was the turn of Paul Da Costa Greaves from Feeding Your Imagination presenting a range of Chocolate bars that we have been ‘sold’ a number of times without success.

There are just too many bars of chocolate around, but you can’t blame this guy for not trying. Last year at Olympia he hired a bill-board outside the show to feature his products. Maybe that’s why he lost £100k last year as he said on the show.

Fortunately not all small producers are so cavalier, but as I have said before, far too many of them are making a loss or simply not making any money at all. Already in the last month one of our suppliers, Foxhill Foods, has gone out of business and I don’t want any more to follow suit.

There is a need for many of these businesses to grow to a size where they are sustainable in the long term. It is an issue of scale! As with any wholesaler, we have products that do large volumes and many others that don’t, but some of these act as hooks to interest customers to buy the rest of the range from us. To some extent this will always be the case, but there is a need to increase the volumes overall.

This is the main aim of our supplier conference on 14th September, to which around 100 suppliers have confirmed attendance. The subject is ‘Working in Partnership’ – and just to note that this was arranged well before the article in Fine Food Digest I blogged about last time!

Some of our suppliers understand what this means, and to be frank, others don’t have a clue. The aim of the conference is to take all our suppliers attending further down the partnership road, which I am convinced will result in significant increases in volume of sales. For some of the smaller ones this could make a huge difference, and make all of us some more money!

I’m looking forward to September enormously as Cotswold Fayre will be very much out there again after a short period of having to focus on ourselves to get the move done and put some new structures in place.

See you on stand 340 at SFFF – and just a note to potential new suppliers, we are not on the stand to buy. There will be some of us with our “buying hats” on at the show, but we will visit your stand!