“We wanted to do local food”

As well as an award-winning shop on Rochester High Street, Austen's also runs a fruit and veg box delivery service from Medway City Estate. Steven met owners Andy and Carol Austen at their office there to talk about the ten years they have run the business, if one end of Rochester High Street is better for business than another, and why their cherries taste so good.

What is your official occupation? 
Andy: My official occupation is basically administering and overseeing the operation of the two businesses.  
Carol: General dogsbody, cleaner, everything. I do the accounts here and the admin work here with HR. I fill in at the shop when necessary.

What are the two different businesses?
Andy: We've got the farm shop on the high street, and then here we've got our delivery business, which is primarily a veg box business, but we do deliver food commercially. When we first started, we did more commercial, but we quickly stopped that. It wasn’t profitable and an absolute waste of time.
We started off at 137 on the high street. We started off with the small farm shop there, and we also did all the preparation for the veg box deliveries there as well, believe it or not. Then covid came. We were busy then, but then covid came, and everyone wanted deliveries. We decided we'd have a waiting list. That waiting list soon got up to 80. We decided that we would take it out of the shop, because we just couldn't cope with it, and we moved over to here, to the pack house, as we call it, downstairs. It's mainly a morning operation, and then it's dispatched to the driver and off they go. We're doing that five days a week, around about 200 boxes or so a week. They are repeat customers. We don't do one-offs. 
One of the reasons it was good here was that it had the office upstairs, and because to start with, we were all in the shop working, we came over here as well, and it's nice and peaceful and quiet, and we can concentrate on the administration of it.

It's a family business? 
Andy: Yeah. They are all involved. Jess [daughter] drifts in and out.
Carol: We beg her to do the social media.
Andy: Because she is good at it. Then our two boys have a knack for the delivery side and taking it to the next level.

You're always looking at new things, you're getting to learn the buying habits on the high street, and that takes several years to do that

Why did you decide to open that first farm shop? 
Andy: We wanted to do something. I was working corporate sales in London for Canon and had been doing that for 25 years. I fancied a change from it. I got interested in this shop called Pips, which was a greengrocer, and I had an idea of what I wanted to create. Initially, that was up for sale, but they wanted stupid money for it. We made them an offer of what we thought it was worth. They didn't accept the offer. We went off and did our own thing, and the idea was to support local farms, local artisans, and to have a business that was looking to reduce single use plastics and to give people nice quality on the high street.
Carol: Pips, family business that was there for many years, was taken over, and it went downhill. We're not slagging off Pip. It went to another owner, and they run it into the ground.
Andy: It's been a long, labourious process, years, because you try things out. You're always looking at new things, you're getting to learn the buying habits on the high street, and that takes several years to do that. It was popular to start with, even though we were down that bottom end of the high street, people were coming down. It's an end that people don't go to. When we'd been there eight years, we moved to a new shop and people were coming in saying, “I didn't even know you were here.” The best area on the high street really is from the car park, up the high street. We moved, and we doubled our turnover, which gives you lot more options of what you can do.  
In the old shop, there was no appetite from the landlord to repair all the leaking ceilings. When it rained really hard, we literally had water coming down the walls into light switches. It was horrendous, and we just had enough. The girls instigated. They said, “Let's go and have a look for something else,” and that one was available.

Was there a particular thing about fruit and veg that was the hook for you?
Andy: It was because we wanted to do local food, and it was the most obvious choice. There's all these local farms all across Kent that are growing great food of lovely quality, but you've got to find them because in amongst them there are some pretty mundane ones. Three months before we opened, we went around as much as we could, get a look, literally visited farms, and had conversations, and it developed from there. 

How long until you started doing the fruit and veg boxes?
Andy: We opened in the July, and then we started officially in the October of that year. We've still got dozens of customers from ten and a half years ago that still get a box every week. I did the delivering at that point. It started off, we were doing ten a week, and then it kept going up. 

People will pay for quality

What would you say today is the biggest challenge with having a business based around fresh fruit and vegetables?  
Andy: An issue that's always ongoing is supply issues. You can't avoid that. With fresh fruit and vegetables, you've got the issues of it turning up on time. We've got staff downstairs ready to start at eight o'clock in the morning, and they don't turn up till nine o'clock in the morning, so you've lost an hour. At the moment, I have to say they are very good, but then the quality of what comes in over time. They know what we expect. You still get sent some crap sometimes, which obviously we can't use, because we don't, unless it’s top quality. The main supplier we use does a lot with local farms.
Things like your oranges of this world, and certain items that aren't in season during the winter. Obviously, you can't not sell them, because people still want to eat them. They go to market to get those, they then deliver everything together. So they might be late because of that, delayed at the markets, and those are the types of issues. 
Carol: They have to come up the M2, so sometimes it is traffic. They're the other side of Maidstone, they're on a farm, they have got the lanes. Then our driver has to come back and load up, and we have problems. One of the reasons we chose this place is because it's quite near. 
Andy: As the spring comes in, the summer comes in, then you've got a lot more produce. You've got the berries, and we get them from Hugh Lowe in Mereworth on the other side of Maidstone. You turn up, and your order might not be ready. You might have to wait for an hour. Little things like that have a knock on effect. Those are the main issues. The one area is that you would normally expect to get problems is staff. We do get the odd issue. 
Carol: We're really, really lucky.
Andy: We look after them. That's the thing. 

Is there the potential challenge where you're dealing with local produce that has these issues meaning that someone who is getting their box on a Friday will get different fruit the person on a Monday?
Andy: It's really well organised. Box contents are decided on a Friday for the next week. They then go on a Saturday onto the website. Every customer then knows what they're going to get in their boxes next week, and they get those items. Occasionally, there might be a slight variation if something's not good quality, but they then get that throughout the week. They go onto the website and if they want to swap up to a couple of items for something else, we do that for them. They add extras to their boxes. Eggs, meat, dairy, all those things. We combine that with their order as well. Most of them have that on a weekly basis. We know exactly what we're ordering. Everything's pre-ordered on the Friday for the following week, even down to the exact kilo on each day. Our suppliers know exactly what that is. Everything is well organised. We've mastered that over a number of years.
Carol: Everything comes in fresh every day.
Andy: We deal with all the crap of the issues, of how we get it here and how we order it. The customer just receives their box, and it’s what they ordered. 
People will pay for quality, and our box prices, we haven't put them up for over ten years. That's about to change. It's got to change. It is a premium product at a premium price, and people will pay for that. Also, it's the experience of going to the shop. They get looked after, make us feel special and all the rest of it. It's all part of an experience, but people now, more so than they did ten years ago, the way that things have become more popular, they all carry a price, and that helps us.  
Carol: Our meat supplier, an award-winning butcher's, even though you appear to find things a bit more expensive, everyone who actually buys it then says, “They didn't shrink, they didn't waste, I ate it all.” It's much better value for money. 

To pick a product, say cherries. Why do the cherries taste so different? 
Andy: Well, the farm is fantastic. It was Henry VIII's appointed berry and cherry farm. The soil is excellent. The orchards are established. But what they do that's different is that most growers will say, “We'll pick those trees today,” and you just hope that the flavour's going to be good. What they do, they've got a lab on the farm, and I’ve actually been in there and done it with them. They know what the optimum level of sweetness and sourness should be for that cherry at its premium. They'll take them into the lab. If it doesn't hit that level, if it's not ready, they don't pick them. When it's ready, then they pick them. The cherries you're eating are being picked at the optimum time, that they are exactly at the flavour that it should be. Of course, there's not just one variety, they grow ten different varieties. Early season, mid-season, late season. They grade all of them, so we only get 31mm plus size. They just fall through the holes, and we get all the big ones, and they do that for us. That's what makes them special. There is so much thought gone into it, and I like that.