Letter from America

Speciality Bites with

Paul Hargreaves

Chief executive of Cotswold Fayre

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I am currently at Fancy Food Show in New York, but possibly more importantly a few days out of the office to clear my head and get my head out of my laptop, and get an overview and fresh perspective

There is no better place than the USA for picking up new ideas and hopefully a few new products, and there are a couple of products I am specifically seeking for an important customer, and before you say anything these products aren’t available in the UK otherwise we would have bought them already.

I have been thinking about that dilemma recently. Cotswold Fayre is primarily a wholesaler of British and Irish speciality foods and that is the way it will always stay. However, with many of the British brands we sell throughout the UK through our field sales team of 8 and office telesales team of another 8, we are often only dealing with the small accounts. Some of our British suppliers find it all too tempting to deal direct with some large accounts, when they are approached, even though in many cases we may supply these retailers ourselves anyway. Amazingly they don’t see anything wrong with this, but I do! Not because I want to control the UK market, but because I know for Cotswold Fayre to be able to do a brand justice, I need my entire sales team behind the brand. If they introduce a brand to a larger retailer only to be bypassed when they order, guess what, they aren’t going to put all their energy behind that brand in the future. Some suppliers simply fail to understand that doing this will actually result in lower sales in the future and less profit – not more! Possibly more along these lines at a future time.

On a different note, and two days later than the first section, I have just arrived back at my hotel after a thoroughly inspiring retail tour in New York. The idea was to give us a flavour of speciality food retailers here in New York before our meetings start at the Fancy Food Show. I can only come to the conclusion that many retailers in the UK have a lot to learn. Three factors on first thoughts that many of us could improve upon:

From the managers who showed us round each place we visited, tremendous passion. Inspiring, in fact. It was as if they were the owners. Are there members of our teams who people would mistake for us, the owners?

- Sense of theatre. In 2 or 3 of the retailers we visited the sense of theatre with the selling of food was fantastic. Often the mixing of eating in and taking out helped with this as did one place called Eataly, where customers can see food being made as they are buying it.

- Merchandising. Helped by amazing volumes of stock due to heavy footfall in New York, the merchandising of fresh products was on a different level. Two retailers were better than Wholefoods, which is considered to be at the top level within the UK

New York is, of course, a great place to retail, and the energy and passion here is legend. Let’s take that energy and passion into our week ahead.