Brighton-based “ethical supermarket” Hisbe Food has turned to the crowd to fund the opening of a second store.
Established in 2013 to create a more sustainable supermarket – offering ethical brands, loose fruit & veg and refill stations – Hisbe, which stands for ‘how it should be’, has now secured a site to open a second store in Worthing this summer.
To fund the shop’s fit-out and cover the expected first year losses of the Worthing store, Hisbe is looking to raise £450k in a crowdfunding campaign via Triodos Bank.
The supermarket is offering unsecured bonds with a 5% annual interest at a seven-year term for a minimum investment of £50.
With 15 days left on its campaign, Hisbe has so far raised £367k, or 82% of its target.
“We created Hisbe to transform the UK’s food industry, because right now it just isn’t sustainable,” said co-founder Ruth Anslow. “There needs to be a great shift in the way people shop for food and we think supermarkets can be part of the solution instead of part of the problem.
“At Hisbe, we’re on a mission to reinvent the way supermarkets do business and we are doing things very differently, to show that it is possible to buck convention and break the mould.”
Hisbe’s Brighton store expects to have generated £1.8m turnover in financial year 2019. The business is currently loss-making, but the opening of a second site is forecast to bring the company to profitability.
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