Amazon: Friend or Foe?

We speak to the owner of a deli who has been burned by questionable stockist promises made by food manufacturers and a producer who has a refreshing approach to the online retailer (which shouldn’t affect indies too aversely), while an industry expert shares his views of the future of the food trade.

Phil Gunton, Gunton’s Deli
This story happens time and time again: a new producer saying with hand on heart that they will not sell to anyone but independents. Accountants or greed get involved, and as there is not enough money in small shops, they conveniently forget their promises and go for the fast buck whilst shafting the people who helped them build their brand. How they can see this is of benefit to anyone other than themselves at the detriment of their current stockists is beyond me, but their response will probably involve a fair quantity of spin around the fact that it will increase brand awareness etc.

I haven’t really got a problem with this if it’s what producers want to do, but what I do take issue with is them telling us that they’re never going to supply major retailers and then doing it anyway, once you’ve got a big pile of stock. I personally believe that if they tell you this, that they should give you notice before they go into the supermarkets so you can de-list or decide what you want to do. You’d assume that you have a contract with the producer under the terms specified when you started working together.

Will Little, Little’s Coffee
We decided to sell through Amazon as we don’t have our own website, and we thought it would be a good idea to supply a retailer who had an established distribution set up and large number of unique visitors. It’s always been our plan to sell through both independent retailers and online via Amazon, and that’s not going to change. As our products are quite cheap, only around £3 per product, I didn’t see the point of employing a team of people to pick and pack such low value orders. As a result we decided to supply wholesale rather than the end user, in order to get the best value.

I hope that independent retailers aren’t affected by us selling via Amazon, but to an extent it’s unavoidable. We try to maximise our distribution via the UK, which is why we work with major distributors; this means that our customers don’t have to travel too far to get their hands on our product. If someone gets in contact with us and they don’t have a stockist nearby, that’s when we direct them onto Amazon – it hugely helps in filling in the geographical gaps that our bricks and mortar stockists can’t cover.

I really don’t want Amazon to threaten our independent retailer stockists, and the fact that it only stocks our coffees in packs of six hopefully means that they’re only selling to people who want to buy our coffee online in bulk, rather than those who would buy it in an independent as more of an impulse purchase.

Ed Dowding, FoodTrade
If we were starting from scratch to design the best food system we can, what would it look like? Let’s jump forward 10 years and look backwards. (The first iPhone was launched just 7 years ago, and now we’re never lost, can order anything from anywhere, and can take credit-card payments from market stalls - 10 years is a long time!)

It’s 2025. Your deli is doing better than ever, and you’ve just taken today’s delivery of fresh, local, seasonal produce out of the back of the delivery van. If it were a larger order they’d have sent a driver, but since it was just a few boxes it was one of the driverless electric vehicles which picked up from the wholesale market on the edge of town.

It was Amazon who started doing collections as well as deliveries in 2017. There was so much food being produced in cities thanks to iFarm kits and continued austerity economics that they realised they could pick-up and bring it into their supply-chain. They never had to overcome the long public mistrust of supermarkets, it supported and empowered local and independent business, it delivered fresher food, with less packaging, and switching was easy since we were all doing online ordering anyway.

There were some other changes to the chain-of-custody laws, reductions in subsidies, and more tweaks to land use laws, but it’s amazing how many of the things which made the food system better were nothing to do with the food system at all.

This is just a fraction of what’s coming.

Image courtesy of Annette Shaff - Shutterstock.com