Five Years of HFM, A Thank You & Our Proudest Achievements
An important date is looming at the end of May…
Five years of the HFM Shop in Hoole!
We’ve been so thrilled with the support we’ve received from our local community over the last five years.
We founded Hoole Food Market because we wanted a local shop which sold the best quality food for a reasonable price, continually reduced its environmental impact and provided value across the supply chain.
Imagine how happy we were to discover it was something that so many other people wanted too!
Over the last five years we:
Delivered more than 62500 HFM Veg Boxes to local houses
Supplied more than 50 restaurants, cafe’s, bars, hotels and schools
Removed lots of carbon from our deliveries using electric vans and cargo trikes
Used as little packaging as possible, minimising our plastic pollution
Kept a lid on food inflation with many items the same price or lower than five years ago
Navigated through a cost of living crisis
Continued to do what we do through a global pandemic
Minimised bouquet packaging to just recyclable paper and paper tape
Designed and created every single bouquet from scratch and on site at HFM
So how and why do we do what we do?
It all started with a realisation that food should be better for the environment than the type found on (or in) plastic life support, after having been on a long and convoluted journey to a supermarket….
The time before COVID now seems like aeons ago, but that’s where the HFM journey began.
In a previous life, in another workplace, and after sending another few pallet sized, waist height containers off to land-fill, all brimming with perfectly edible food wrapped in lots of plastic, much of it filled with a “modified atmospheric gas” to prolong shelf life, I had a light bulb moment; there’s got to be a better way!
Then on Christmas Eve 2018, after disposing of more than 3000kg of still-in-date potatoes due to a computer generated order error, Leann and I set about making sure we could play an active part, in a new life, changing the way people shop. An attempt at facilitating a reasonably priced, fresher, zero waste, minimal packaging and low food miles style of shopping.
We’re very grateful to have received so much amazing support from our local community for what we do, and have always done our very best to reciprocate the same level of support.
As well as minimising the impact our business has on the environment, we like to do all we can to support our local community. Especially over the last couple of years where finances have been stretched for so many people, households and families, as well as businesses.
In short, we like to make sure the produce we supply doesn’t cost the earth either economically or ecologically. We call this approach “EconomoLogical”.
Over the past eighteen months, we’ve embarked on a journey to become the most efficient small food retail, web and wholesale business around. This has involved reviewing every single process we have and ensuring there’s as little friction as possible. And over the weeks, months and years, we’ve managed to reduce our overhead costs, in spite of many other individual bills rising.
This endeavour has proved so successful that we have managed to invest these savings into our gross profit margins, reducing the price of our produce to customers.
The main behind the scenes improvements have been through innovations in systems, process and software implementation. Ensuring our systems link up effectively has been a real challenge due to the operational turbulence created by the sudden and unforeseen affects of the pandemic. In order to ensure we were able to fill the void left by the inflexible and at that time, incapable supermarket supply chain, we had to rapidly invest in lots of new kit, often without testing compatibility with current systems.
However, the reduced friction in now having systems working in harmony has ensured lower operating costs; savings which we can pass on.
We’re really proud to unveil some of the amazing results and would like to share a few stats which really show how far we’ve come…
Last month, we achieved a landmark goal and reduced the price of our bananas! This is something we have been striving for since we opened.
Bananas, being literally the most popular fruit in this country, make a healthy contribution to our sales; in the last 12 months we’ve sold more than 60,000 bananas, not including those which are contained in our veg boxes.
However, without altering the quality or standard of our bananas (they are, and always have been the Chiquita premium brand), we reduced the price from 32p each to 20p each - a reduction of nearly 40%!
As previously mentioned, we have always wanted to make shopping locally more affordable than at a supermarket. So we were thrilled to be able to launch our price matching and price beating web page earlier this year. On our Cost Leading at HFM page you’ll find a selection of typically more than 60 items which we have managed to beat or match the price of compared to the lowest price supermarkets. Thus proving that shopping locally and more thoughtfully, responsibly and ethically can also be better for your finances.
Of course, proof of our longest standing commitment to ensuring the best food is affordable to everyone is contained in our HFM Veg Boxes, which despite ONS measured food inflation of 25% over the last two years, have remained the same price since we launched them more than 5 years ago back in April 2019!
So how have we done this?
Anyone who keeps a keen eye on the national business and economic news will be more than familiar with the words “Productivity Crisis”, and we have done everything we can to ensure we are as productive and efficient as possible.
There are three main factors which have contributed to such a huge rise in our efficiency.
First and foremost, the credit must go to our amazing team. We’d be nothing without such a dedicated and hard working team at HFM. Efficiency has become a mindset, with forward thinking and multi-tasking at the core of how we operate - A huge thank you to all past and present members of Team HFM, with a special shout out to long serving HFM Team Members Chris, Nadine, Ryan and Amber who have been so instrumental in ensuring these improvements to efficiency have been, and continue to be achieved.
Secondly, we’ve harnessed as much admin saving technology as possible. This really reduces friction in our operation.
Our delivery planning software is one of the most efficient and labour saving pieces of tech we use - actually first used by us in the early days of the pandemic. I can honestly say we’ve never looked back. If you happen to need route optimisation for any purpose, I can wholeheartedly recommend Routific. We even used it to help plan the routes for The Hospice of The Good Shepherd’s Christmas Tree Collection event this year!
We also overhauled our inventory management with the help of a couple of spreadsheets. This makes it much quicker and easier for us all to do our work and provides much more information to our customers.
You will find an average weight listed on our website for every item of fresh produce to help you know how much you might need for that recipe you’re cooking at the weekend. There’s also a price per KG listed for every item, so you’ll be able to ensure we’re providing the very best value for money. There’s also an up to date (checked daily) country of origin for all items, so you can be aware of how far your food has travelled. Accurate country of origin labelling is something we are very keen to promote, as it’s said that if you’ve been food shopping anywhere ever, you’ve been a victim of food fraud. You generally don’t have to look too far in a large retailer to find packaging adorned with the Union Flag, only to find the origin stamp is that of a different country. We will always strive to do better than that.
Thirdly, our use of clean fuelled vehicles has lowered our delivery costs and overhead motoring expenses. Not to mention the reduced levels of emissions which may have been incurred otherwise. Our electric van covers 60 to 100 delivery miles everyday - truly EconomoLogical!
So where are we going?
Over the next five years, we plan to continue with our process of continuous improvement, leading the way with clean fuelled vehicles. Our next goal is to replace our biggest vehicle, “Bertha” (as Ryan affectionately named it) which hauls a large proportion of our produce from the wholesale markets every day - a real workhorse!
We’re waiting on testing the new all electric, long wheelbase Mercedes eSprinter in the coming months. We have high hopes that this will be able to fill Bertha’s exceptionally large shoes, but this is quite a challenge for any large electric van with current technology, limited range and lower payload at the moment.
It goes without saying that we will also put all our efforts into looking after our local community and all our customers, both economically and ecologically. We will continue our quest of making shopping locally more affordable, better quality and more environmentally friendly than driving to a supermarket.
To celebrate our birthday we’ve designed the beautiful Blue Sky and Sunshine bouquet to reflect the colours of The Hospice of The Good Shepherd, with a touch of Sunshine.
The team at this amazing charity work relentlessly to provide such an important service. So as a way to help boost their fundraising we’ll be donating £5 for every Blue Sky and Sunshine Bouquet we sell during our birthday month of May.
The bouquet is available to order online for free next day delivery and we’ll be making them up fresh every morning to sell at the HFM shop.
Thank you for reading, huge thanks for all your support, and here’s to the next five years!
Jason, Leann and all the team at HFM
