Celebrating 20 years in business

June 2002, we opened the doors of the ground floor deli.  Tomos, our eldest son was just over 1 year old and Sam our younger son wasn’t even born.  We didn’t really have an idea what we were doing but we knew that we loved food and wanted everyone to enjoy what we did.  Simon, a trained chef, had worked in Quartier Vert in Bristol (former Rocinantes) and in London at a variety of lovely places including The Engineer gastro pub in Primrose Hill. He made the delicious homemade meals we had in the counter and Catrin ran the deli.  It was very hard work and a steep learning curve, getting to know our margins, health and safety, suppliers etc.  How to load a pricing gun was a big challenge as was learning about all the different cheeses.

But we loved it.  Fast forward 20 years and we’ve still got many of the regular customers as well as lots of new ones that we love meeting.  We’ve won quite a few awards – from the Observer Food Monthly to Independent Retail Consortium’s Best Independent Shop UK, oh and Guild of Fine Food Best Farm Shop and Deli. All thanks to the amazing people who work in the deli spreading their foodie enthusiasm.

We have had two cafes and closed them to concentrate on catering – we now do events of all sizes, weddings, parties, working lunches – and big feasts.  We also have a cookery school which has proved to be very popular with classes selling out quickly.

Food and retail have changed so much – there were many fewer restaurants and knowledge around ingredients, provenance and sustainability was so much rarer.  We have learned so much about food and retail and look forward to serving our customers for another 20 years!

This lovely article from the Bristol Post is worth a read!

Since then we’ve done so many things – Catrin spends much of her time as an executive and business coach and has launched a natural fragrance Jones & Modha!