scotland
focus on
With Scotland’s Speciality Food Show taking place on January 19-21, it’s time for our annual focus on speciality food north of the border. We have an indepth interview with Joe Wall of The Cress Co, a full show preview on pages 35-36 and a round-up of recent Scottish product launches on page 33.
Crossing borders Former man-witha-van Joe Wall tells MICK WHITWORTH about making distribution pay across Scotland’s challenging geography, and his plans to drive The Cress Co deeper into England
J
oe Wall is just pouring himself a glass of Luscombe hot ginger beer when I arrive to interview him at Craigie’s Farm Deli & Café, a few miles west of Edinburgh and close to the Forth Bridge. Craigie’s is one of the Dunfermline-based distributor’s most consistent customers, and Luscombe – located nearly 500 miles away in rural Devon – one of his top-selling brands. This seems a little ironic since Wall’s business, The Cress Co, is perhaps the best-known specialist distributor of Scottish-made artisan food and drink. But it exemplifies how Wall has made a success of shifting relatively niche lines – English and Scottish – in a part of the world where even supermarket suppliers struggle with the cost of getting product from A to B. Raised in the Highlands, within an hour’s drive of Inverness, Wall started his business 10 years ago, working solo from a little industrial unit in Perth. His original ambition, he says, was to go into business as a food producer himself. But talking to established operators such as salmon smoker Keith Dunbar at Summer Isles Foods, he soon realized that, good as they were, they all suffered from one huge headache: getting their goods to market. So he set up instead as a small-scale man-with-a-van, mainly serving the Highlands and the north-east of Scotland. “I spent five
Joe Wall: ‘Rather than drive straight past hotels or cafés, we’ll service anyone, anywhere we go’
years, working on my own, living on a shoestring. Most of my suppliers were based in the area I was selling in, so I’d pick stuff up in Inverness or Aberdeen and work my way round, doing some deliveries, making some appointments. “And then we started getting a lot of enquiries from the south…” English brands like Luscombe face much the same challenges getting small case quantities to outlets scattered across Scotland as
having a Scottish voice to handle sales calls north of the border. “Alex Albone at [Lincolnshire-based] Pipers Crisps always says, ‘the bloody Scots will only buy from other Scots!’” jokes Wall. But his real masterstroke has been to maximise the value from every vehicle movement – a trick that supermarkets and major hauliers are still trying to perfect. If he stuck rigidly to ‘speciality’ brands, or only sold Scottish food, or only delivered to upmarket delis, or refused Distribution in Cumbria and to handle any mainstream Yorkshire is a joy compared brands, The Cress Co with here. The concentration would never have got off the ground. The cost of of retailing is much greater. delivering to a few niche outlets across hundreds of miles of producers in those outlying regions territory would by untenable. face reaching the rest of the UK. “The frustrating thing for me is They also recognize the value of
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that it can be cheaper to get a pallet from Dunfermline to Cornwall than to Inverness.” So The Cress Co, now headquartered in an 11,000 sq ft unit in Dunfermline, takes Scottish products south, English and Welsh products north, and aims to deliver to the widest possible client base in between. This is particularly crucial, Wall says, when working across the Highlands & Islands, where it is hard to make the sums add up. “The west coast is still very tough,”he says, “But rather than saying ‘we only deliver to delis and farm shops’ and driving straight past the doors of hotels and cafés, we’ll service anyone, wherever we go. We’re not delivering to all of them all of the time, but our customer base is very, very big. “Maybe 10-15% of our
Vol.14 Issue 10 · November-December 2013
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