Summary (and Winner!) Of Our Box Scheme Customer Survey

(Read to the end to find out the winner of our prize draw!)

MOTIVATION

What we learned

The overwhelming majority of our customers cited  ‘Locally Grown & Organic’ as their motivation for signing up to our Box Scheme. The next most popular motivation was the ethos and values of our farm. It is great to know that our customers are passionate about knowing where their food comes from, that their priority is to reduce the Carbon Footprint of their food and they are conscious of the importance of shopping locally where possible to ensure sustainability and reduce environmental impact.

What are we going to do, going forward?

We are committed to providing as much of our own produce as possible for as much of the year as possible to all our customers. The Hungry Gap means that we have to buy in organic veg from our wholesale suppliers between February/March – May/June. Whilst we endeavour to get veg from the UK to fill the gaps (i.e. mushrooms, potatoes, onions, leafy greens )  the nature of the growing season here means that we often have no choice but to order veg from Europe. We are looking at possibly offering a ‘Hungry Gap Bag’ for next year which would contain only UK produce to diversify our offering and keep it as ‘local’ as possible.

COMMUNICATION

Email appears to be the favourite method of communication between us and our customers with the e-Newsletter The Onion Oracle coming in second (to sign up for our e-News, visit our Home Page) . Social Media communication comes in third.

It is clear that online communication is the first choice for our customers as almost everyone uses their smart phones/computers to access emails and information on a near-daily basis. We are going to be putting more focus on our on-line newsletter to keep our customers in the loop with news from the farm, important announcements and updates which will be emailed out to our database.

We are soon to be introducing a new Box Scheme ordering system which will include more regular email communication which we hope will keep our customers up to date with our veg delivery scheme and will link up to our e-newsletter.

We have also recently set up the YouTube channel which we will be using to share videos from the farm – including behind the scenes style videos, and also more informative videos on specific events on the farm and topics we feel passionate about.

PACKAGING

What we learned

It is clear the majority of our customers would prefer cardboard boxes for their weekly fruit and veg delivery. Cardboard is sturdier and more durable than the paper bags we are currently using, therefore would last longer and require less waste.

Here we see that most customers would like to see our leafy greens packaged in paper bags. The reason we pack our leafy greens in plastic is to extend the quality and freshness as much as possible, to ensure our veg always tastes as good as it can. Paper bags can cause the leaves to wilt much more quickly than in plastic and, especially in summer, this can really be a problem. We are conscious of the amount of plastic we use and so this is an ongoing conversation for us.

What are we going to do going forward?

We will be looking at replacing the paper bags we currently use with cardboard boxes in an effort to respond to our customers needs and also reduce our wastage of paper bags. Cardboard Boxes will be a more sustainable option as we can reuse them on a much longer term basis. They are stronger and would withstand the muddier veg in winter and would eliminate the need for our biodegradable plastic bag inserts that we have had to use to reinforce our paper bags during wet and rainy weather to avoid the bags falling apart. This elimination of plastic would be our main motivation for the change over to boxes.

We are going to be trialling our salad packs in paper bags, as well as plastic, to see how our customers respond and to see if the reduction in quality is a problem. We will consider using no packaging for some items and risk them becoming a bit muddier as a result, as we feel our customers would prefer this to using plastic. Where possible we will bunch all larger, sturdier leafy greens such as Kale/Chard.

CHOICE

What we learned

What are we going to do going forward?

We will be extending our Extras offering to include a more diverse variety of options, as we feel this offers our customers more choice and personalisation to their weekly order. Our decision to offer a set bag of vegetables each week is in line with our ethos of focusing on our own seasonal produce that is dictated by our harvest, availability and the amount of each particular veg we produce, which is often very much in the hands of the Gods! We do however appreciate that there are some seasonal extras that we do not grow that we would like to offer from local UK suppliers like mushrooms, sprouts and herbs.

THE WINNER OF OUR SURVEY PRIZE DRAW

Thank you to everyone to filled out the survey and entered our competition, we really appreciate your feedback and suggestions.

The Winner of a months supply of our Tolhurst veg was Ravinder Kaur!

In line with data protection responsibilities, the company has destroyed all the personal data provided after this survey was generated. We take data protection very seriously and we will never share your data with third parties.