‘Prior to lockdown, we’d had seven transactions in as many years’: How online sales changed small food producers

Clare Finney speaks to the independent food producers – from butchers to cheesemakers – who turned their businesses around overnight to cope with the huge demand for online shopping during the pandemic

Tom Calver, a farmer and cheesemaker at Westcombe Dairy in Somerset, set up a website in 2013 but did not need to rely on it, until a few months ago (Westcombe Dairy)

Sales increases of 1,000 per cent; record customer engagement; new audiences. For small independent food businesses during lockdown, online shopping has been nothing short of a godsend. Food pages of the newspapers have been filled almost daily with stories of butchers, bakers and cheesemakers whose bacon has been saved by ecommerce; for cheesemakers in particular, whose pre-lockdown market largely consisted of restaurants and events caterers, it’s been the difference between scraping a living and wasting mountains of cheese.

Yet what on paper – well, screen – reads like a perfect solution has, in reality, placed a sizeable burden on business owners who weren’t prepared – who indeed never set out – to be focused almost solely on online retail; who overnight found themselves grappling with address labels, couriers, packaging options and mail-order spreadsheets.

It was “a nightmare”, says Magali Russie of Spice Mountain, a spice company with shops in Borough Market and Stratford. Since 22 March, she’s been working 15-hour days. Overnight, sales through her website went from 30 a day to 250 – “and I had to furlough 18 staff to keep the business afloat, so it was just my husband and me”. Normally when you expand your business in a new direction, you are prepared, she continues. “You build slowly. You have a plan,” she says.