Daring to diversify: Flourish Foodhall

Creating or revamping a top tier store is no mean feat for even an experienced retailer, but for a distributor – albeit one with 25 years of fine food wholesale under its belt – it’s even more of a triumph.

The story of Flourish Foodhall goes beyond a recognisable tale of independent retailer diversification into one of the convergence of distribution and commerce. In this project both sectors ably assist the other – and both retail sites also house popular restaurants – but there are still plenty of avenues to explore says Paul Hargreaves, CEO of fine food distributor Cotswold Fayre and Flourish Foodhall. 

Lessons learned

“The biggest eye-opener was the hospitality side – just the number of people you need to make it work is phenomenal,” says Paul. The retail side of Flourish was a more comfortable learning curve as the team had learned lessons from their two and a half decades working with fine food retailers, but hospitality was a steeper hill to climb. “In hospitality, you can ruin a customer’s experience in 10 minutes so the time pressure is intense. There’s more of a danger of customers not returning if they have a negative experience.” Despite this heightened pressure and relative lack of experience, incorporating restaurants into the site was a must for Paul, as while it requires high levels of cost and manpower, it can often be a regular revenue booster that is required when the retail side is finding its feet.

“We didn’t have enough staff – around 30 across the shop and restaurant – when it opened, and even though we deliberately didn’t do much marketing as we wanted to ease ourselves in, we were completely deluged with customers.” The Flourish team pulled together to make it work, with Paul often clearing tables during the first few months. “Thankfully people gave us a fair amount of grace as we were new,” he says.

Powered by people

Sustainability has long been at the heart of Cotswold Fayre, and while the business has changed a lot in the past 10 years, its passion for doing good remains. “With the Flourish projects we had a blank slate and were keen to make it the very best it could be – transferring the culture of Cotswold Fayre and building on it. One thing we’ve learned is how to better articulate what we’re about, and this has helped to attract the right people to join the team.”

Caring for people and planet is at the heart of the business, and Paul and his team are proud to be part of a group of people that takes its role in the food chain – and community – seriously. “Since opening Flourish, I’ve realised that many people in the hospitality world get treated pretty badly but we heard some pretty horrendous stories when we were interviewing people about how they were treated by employers. We were recruiting for our Glenavon site at the tail end of the Covid-19 pandemic, and there were a lot of people either looking for work or disillusioned and wanting to start again.”

As well as offering fresh starts to local employees who had previously been scarred by negative experiences, Paul is keen to sing the praises of his young team – and quash the reputation they are often given. “We have a lot more younger people working at Flourish than we have at Cotswold Fayre, and while from some quarters young people can get a bad press, they are a remarkable team. They often go beyond what we ask them to do, and the story that they are lazy and don’t want to work hasn’t been the case here,” he explains. “Creating the right culture has been part of that, and we have had to lose a couple of people, but on the whole the young people at Flourish want to work hard and do a good job – and to be part of something. They often have a greater awareness of the issues around sustainability than older generations, and are attracted to what we do.”

Neurodivergent employees are given opportunities they likely otherwise wouldn’t be afforded, thanks to a team member’s family connection with a local charity. Indeed, a relative of a Flourish team member who has autism commented that the role has changed the whole family’s life for the better. 

“We have four neuro-diverse people in our team and work with a local charity to help them get back into the workplace,” explains Paul. “There are three autistic members of staff and one with downs syndrome, and they are an important part of what we do. There’s a massive underutilisation of people with neurodivergence as businesses often write them off, but in the right role they are often better than other team members at certain things. Their attention to detail is fantastic, and people love having them around. Customers love them being there, and staff are learning to relate to people who are different to them, so it’s a complete win-win. They get treated absolutely as equals, just as they should be.”

Smart stocking

Three years after the opening of its Glenavon Farm site, located snugly between Bath and Bristol, in November 2024 the Flourish team created a second shop at Farleigh Road – a tweak on an exciting farm shop which has proudly carried a number of loyal customers staff members along for the ride. 

Although branching out into retail was never part of Paul’s business plan for Cotswold Fayre, the two arms of the company sit comfortably side by side. In fact, this unique ecosystem is demonstrating shared benefits – with stocking decisions on the retail sites influencing the Cotswold Fayre catalogue, and new items in the wholesaler’s range getting test runs in-store.

After two and half decades in the fine food world, it may not be wholly surprising that Paul and his team are taking the smart approach – tailoring the offering at each store to support each site’s individual customer preferences but at all points remaining true to the Flourish (and Cotswold Fayre) ethos. While the shops cater to slightly different audiences – Glenavon Farm, an ex-potato farm, is located next to a busy road just a few miles from Bath city centre, while Farleigh Road is off the beaten track – there are a number of details that leave visitors safe in the knowledge that they are in safe, Flourish hands. Yes, there are design touches such as rustic wood and a tasteful colour palate that bring the sites together, but features such as fridges stacked high with Himalayan pink salt in which to expertly age carcasses behind the butchery counter – faggots are a particularly strong seller – and deli products made on-site up the ante for fine food lovers.

While the bulk of both shops’ stock comes from Cotswold Fayre, naturally, local suppliers are supported too. Freshly-baked loaves from nearby Hobbs House Bakery are available from both stores, honey from local beekeepers is always in-stock to keep locals’ pesky seasonal allergies at bay, and items like Bath-made chorizo and pepperoni mean that home cooks can indulge in their favourite foods while supporting the local economy. 

With sustainability running through the core of Flourish, and members of its team boasting decades of experience in the fine food industry via Cotswold Fayre, it’s understandable that consolidation is of vital importance for the foodhalls’ buyers. “If you go to most retailers in this sector, they’ll probably say that they have too many suppliers. Consolidating your suppliers can offer a sizeable reduction in carbon emissions,” Paul explains. 

“By dealing with a huge range of suppliers, retailers can create excess work and have too many deliveries coming in and too many orders to do – with more people off the shop floor than on it in order to deal with all the admin. A lot of retailers would love to lessen their administration burden and doing more consolidation is a good way of doing that. We would always advise retailers to shop locally, as we do too, but the number of suppliers tends to creep as time goes on and if you’re not careful it can get out of control.” While Flourish isn’t simply a Cotswold Fayre showroom, it demonstrates that you can have most if not all of your products come from one place and still be successful and an attractive place.

Creating an ecosystem

Flourish has also invested in environmental sustainability, taking valuable steps to manage and minimise its environmental impact including water harvesting and heat exchange systems, as well as placing as many solar panels as the local council will allow on their roofs, and while these adaptations form a vital part of Flourish’s work the sustainability buck doesn’t stop here for Paul. “As a B Corp-certified business we have gone through the assessment of which only one of five sections is about environmental sustainability,” Paul explains, and while significant care is taken to reduce the business’s impact on the planet – including stock consolidation as mentioned above – and strong communication with customers around the work they are doing, such as a visible meter in the restaurant which measures carbon savings, the wider community is just as important to Paul and his team. 

In particular, Flourish’s Glenavon site is an ever-evolving ecosystem benefitting locals and visitors alike. A pottery studio, where people of all ages and abilities are welcomed to create their own masterpiece is proving to be hugely popular – and profitable – and a tenant runs a popular martial arts gym in a space on-site that would otherwise be empty. Backing onto a lake and with an expansive Somerset skyline behind the operation, there are naturally plans afoot to make the most of its stunning (and easily accessible) location. 

While Flourish Foodhall has decades of fine food expertise in its arsenal, its success in a relatively short period of time should be attributed to much more than this. The team’s passion for doing good, welcoming like-minded individuals into the fold and creating a supportive ecosystem makes it an especially inspiring endeavour that we all – as consumers as well as industry professionals – can learn from.