OPINION: Why you should work with local suppliers, by Alan Mannings, Shop on the Green, Chartham, Canterbury

We use local suppliers for a huge range of products. We’ve got local suppliers for some of our chilled and frozen products, which we get through Consort, a local wholesaler, as well as cakes, tea and coffee, ice cream and even curries from a local supplier.

Biddenden Vineyards provides us with apple juice. We tried their cider, but it didn’t sell very well for us, so we’ve stuck with the apple juice. We’re the only shop in the area that sells wines from a vineyard only 75 yards up the road. Our £1 bags of assorted sweets all come from a local supplier. I’m in discussions with another local supplier to provide us with sausages, bacon and other meats very soon, and we’ve also got a local farmer who sells whatever they’re growing at the time to us.

Local doesn’t just have to mean made locally, either. We’ve got French crisps called Brets that are imported by a local company. The flavour is absolutely superb and we’re lucky to have them in the shop. It’s no extra work having all these additional suppliers on our books because the relationships with them are so much closer and faster. It’s just about sending them an email and telling them what we want delivered this week, and that’s it.

Know the risks

I would advise retailers not to pay for goods from smaller companies until they’ve arrived and been inspected. Because they’re smaller, they can encounter problems. If they went into administration, you will have paid for a load of produce that was no longer going to turn up and lost that money. It doesn’t happen often, but it can happen.

I would say that fresh and chilled is better suited for local produce. I’ve tried frozen meat before and it didn’t really sell, but I’m going to try it again because we’ve got some new customers in the area.

We don’t stock them in a special ‘local’ section. They’re all within the right categories, but we have signs outside advertising our local credentials and we put them up on our Facebook page as well. It brings in customers who wouldn’t normally come in.

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