Supplier Conference

Speciality Bites with

Paul Hargreaves

Chief executive of Cotswold Fayre

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Our biennial supplier conference took place last week midst IT mayhem at Cotswold Fayre in what became one of the most stressful weeks of running the business

We were actually back up and running within 36 hours, but that was a 36 hours in which I had very little sleep and had a team of techies working until 4 a.m. to get us up and running again.  All due to SQL databases - if you want to know more then I actually now know a lot more than I did about SQL – I could probably bore the pants off you!

So this was the 36 hours immediately prior to our supplier conference where the theme was “Growing together in Partnership”.  Within that we looked at producers producing and growing their brand, whilst the sales and distribution are done by wholesalers such as ourselves.  There are too many producers trying to do a bit of this and a bit of that – and taking their eye off the ball when it comes to NPD and marketing.  And the cry from the retailers is for more consolidation and moving away from having hundreds of suppliers to a few key ones.  Retailers are spending far too much time on ordering stock, managing deliveries, paying tiny invoices and are running out of time to give good service to their customers and market their retail outlet to the surrounding area.  This isn’t me speaking, it is several retailers I have spoken to recently who want to be able to buy more stock through wholesalers.  Yet through history and too many producers still dealing direct it is not happening as fast as it should.

We have a fantastic opportunity in the second decade of the 21st century to make this independent retail sector a significant force within food retailing, but this will never happen because many producers and retailers are still behaving like amateurs.  We all need to move up a gear and make the sector a lot more professional. No, we don’t want independent retailers all to look the same – they should be sourcing local products wherever they can, but we need to make the recognisable brands that customers are used to finding in independent retail available to them – and put in place the supply chain to make this happen.

Well that was the core of the message last week – received by some and not others, but it is the inevitable direction of travel and I will ensure this is the wagon that we are on.  Apart from the serious side we had great fun together and around half the delegates (why not all?) spent an evening in a restaurant overlooking the Thames eating and drinking the evening away.  The weather and company couldn’t’ have been better!

And now back to those SQL databases! Have a good week.