Hand-roasted coffee, baked-to-order biscuits and premium pet food all in a trendy Shoreditch venue – it would be easy to dismiss Market Porter’s Supermarket Siesta as a hipster event. And true enough, most of the 100-odd guests who attended last Thursday appeared to belong to an upmarket London clientele.
But the message behind the event was accessible to those of us who don’t have their own beard barber and an account at their local kimchi eatery. Despite the name, the Supermarket Siesta event wasn’t actually about shunning your local Sainsbury’s. Stefan Porter, CEO of artisan produce website Market Porter and organiser of the event, acknowledges that people aren’t going to turn away from their one-stop shop anytime soon. The days of buying everything separately from specialist butchers/cheesemongers/greengrocers may well be in the past.
Instead, Porter suggests shoppers could put just an extra £1 towards treating themselves in a category of food they enjoy – whether it be coffee, cheese or wine – to top-quality, local produce that you can’t get on the high street. He organised the Supermarket Siesta event primarily to showcase the difference in taste between local and mass-produced wares. But he sees two further consumer benefits of buying directly from smaller producers: the greater freshness and greater traceability that comes from ‘cutting out the middleman’.
As he points out, having a back story on the origins of your produce could be a powerful draw in today’s post-Horsegate era. “Lots of customers want that story, and want to know where their products come from,” Porter says. His argument is backed up by the sheer number of customers who walked around the show asking about the provenance of the food and drink on show. Questions weren’t just superficial: prospective buyers wanted to know exactly how the animals were reared, how their grapes were pressed and how the produce was transported to their homes.
True, it’s hardly a snapshot of the general UK population. Many of the independent sellers at the exhibition said London made up a large proportion of their customer base –presumably on the affluent end of the scale. But, as anyone who has lived in the capital knows, what starts as a London-only fad often spreads to the rest of the country. And there is undeniably a growing movement towards understanding where your food has come from, even at the other end of the scale – as evidenced by Lidl’s ad campaign showing animals reared at UK farms.
So who knows, it may not be a stretch to imagine these independent sellers broadening their appeal beyond foodies and into the mainstream for ‘treat’ purchases. I, for one, am going to splash out on proper hand-roasted coffee rather than resentfully sipping on the instant stuff. Now pass me the beard trimmer and kimchi.
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