For an already successful, single-site, family-owned food retailer, it’s a significant risk to decide to scale it. The decision requires insightful strategy, the implementation of a management structure, codifying the proposition for replication, understanding consumer behaviour and demographics and building supply-chain security, all whilst preserving the owners’ ethos.

Many farm shops seem to polarise their offers around a mix of price, provenance, quality, presentation and/or owner-ethos but few understand which their customers relate to most and leverage the strongest to best-effect. Growth in both revenue and profitability is possible as long as existing customers can be persuaded to come more frequently and/or spend more each time they do so, spend a greater proportion of their food budget in one place, new customers can be lured away from their routine shops and additional product-lines can augment typical purchases. Here’s one approach we’ve taken recently;

• Develop a sophisticated and strategic approach to the implementation of a bold and visionary business plan.
• Use sophisticated brand and communications design to capture, codify and communicate the owners’ core values to customers, employees and suppliers.
• Find and position the business in a competitive market in such a way that it could defend that position from both new entrants and established competitors.
• Get closer to existing customers and use those insights to help inform the owners’ approach to scaling the business.
• Mitigate risk by testing new store layouts within the current store to inform the right approach to the new site.
• Make the store a destination experience for complete families to visit, dwell and spend.
• Go beyond transactional food purchase habits to achieve transformational influence in customers’ eating habits.

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