“Customers don’t want, or have less time, to cook those big cuts of meat like joints of beef or lamb,” says Downes. “What they want now is good quality food and provenance, but also to be able to pop in and out and buy what they want very quickly. And you need to try and design your business to cover all those things.” The biggest trend of the moment that the farm shop has adapted its model to is customers’ desire for a more experience-led shopping environment. This is more than making sure Hawarden’s customers can buy a coffee and a pastry while they shop in the food hall or having an outdoor play area for the kids. It’s offering activities and events like craft workshops, charity runs, zorbing, a mum-and-newborn fitness club, and a weekly makers’ & producers’ market, running every Saturday. “People create people,” explains Downes, “and when you have that, it helps the business to create an identity which connects with people. “Our mission statement used to be ‘real food and natural product’ and it still is to a certain extent,” he adds, “but our new brand is ‘Hawarden Estate Farm Shop: the experience’.” That’s not to say that the farm shop’s retail offering is being eclipsed by the desire to have an experience. It still attracts the lunchtime workers from Airbus (two miles up the road); the day-trippers looking for their nice packet
of biscuits and jar of jam to take home; and the traditional weekly shopper coming in for their Colston Bassett Stilton, homemade black pudding, half a pound of mince and half a dozen eggs – giving the farm shop a healthy average basket spend of £12. But families make up a big part of its customer base, bringing the shop’s highest footfall during the weekends and school holidays. “That’s when people have ‘dwell time’,” says Downes, “and when people have ‘dwell time’ we become a destination.” These busy times are the perfect opportunity to attract this customer group to buy into what the farm shop is offering, making it a part of their family time and – more importantly – get them returning regularly through the doors. Hawarden creates experiences out of things it readily has on the estate, and one example of this Downes gives is pumpkins. “You can go into a supermarket and buy a pumpkin for £1, hollow it out and then throw it away,” he says. “Where is the experience in that?” So, Downes and his marketing team came up with Plant Your Own Pumpkin (a part of the shop’s new Little Growers scheme and a followon from its Pick Your Own Pumpkin scheme) where children can grow their own pumpkin on the estate with the aim of getting families involved, talking to their friends about it and sharing it on social media.
Downes says it was an ingenious way of getting children learning about seasonality and encouraging repeat returns. The children visit their pumpkin to water it and see its progress regularly, while a relaxed mum and dad are spending money in the farm shop and café. “What you’re creating is this multi-layered attraction based on the simplest of things,” he says. “We’ve got the land to create this connection with young families to visit and do something, giving you the footfall and the return. It’s a very small outlay for such a big experience.” That same principle is applied to other produce and flowers throughout the year (the farm shop is holding a Little Growers sunflower competition during my visit), and an in-store junior sausage-making class on the butchery counter also encourages parents to have a coffee in the café while watching and photographing their children and sharing that experience with family, friends and online. “The café, the grounds and the experiences we offer here is the footfall driver,” says Downes. “How you make the rest of the business work is bringing that theatre and aesthetic, so that people want to be here and a part of it.” Regardless of its cover, Hawarden is a book with some exciting chapters and there's no doubt it has many more to come. hawardenestate.co.uk
What you’re creating is this multi-layered attraction based on the simplest of things. It’s a very small outlay for such a big experience.
Vol.20 Issue 5 | June 2019
51