Speciality-Food-Magazine-March-2025

specialityfoodmagazine.com 53 benefitting locals and visitors alike. A pottery studio, where people of all ages and abilities are welcomed to create their ownmasterpiece is proving to be hugely popular – and profitable – and a tenant runs a popular martial arts gym in a space on-site that would otherwise be empty. Backing onto a lake and with an expansive Somerset skyline behind the operation, there are naturally plans afoot to make the most of its stunning (and easily accessible) location. While Flourish Foodhall has decades of fine food expertise in its arsenal, its success in a relatively short period of time should be attributed to muchmore than this. The team’s passion for doing good, welcoming like-minded individuals into the fold and creating a supportive ecosystemmakes it an especially inspiring endeavour that we all – as consumers as well as industry professionals – can learn from. that home cooks can indulge in their favourite foods while supporting the local economy. With sustainability running through the core of Flourish, and members of its teamboasting decades of experience in the fine food industry via Cotswold Fayre, it’s understandable that consolidation is of vital importance for the foodhalls’ buyers. “If you go to most retailers in this sector, they’ll probably say that they have too many suppliers. Consolidating your suppliers can offer a sizeable reduction in carbon emissions,” Paul explains. “By dealing with a huge range of suppliers, retailers can create excess work and have too many deliveries coming in and too many orders to do –with more people off the shop floor than on it in order to deal with all the admin. A lot of retailers would love to lessen their administration burden and doingmore consolidation is a good way of doing that. We would always advise retailers to shop locally, as we do too, but the number of suppliers tends to creep as time goes on and if you’re not careful it can get out of control.” While Flourish isn’t simply a Cotswold Fayre showroom, it demonstrates that you can have most if not all of your products come from one place and still be successful and an attractive place. Creating an ecosystem Flourish has also invested in environmental sustainability, taking valuable steps to manage andminimise its environmental impact including water harvesting and heat exchange systems, as well as placing as many solar panels as the local council will allow on their roofs, and while these adaptations form a vital part of Flourish’s work the sustainability buck doesn’t stop here for Paul. “As a B Corp-certified business we have gone through the assessment of which only one of five sections is about environmental sustainability,” Paul explains, and while significant care is taken to reduce the business’s impact on the planet – including stock consolidation as mentioned above – and strong communication with customers around the work they are doing, such as a visible meter in the restaurant whichmeasures carbon savings, the wider community is just as important to Paul and his team. In particular, Flourish’s Glenavon site is an ever-evolving ecosystem With the Flourish projects we had a blank slate and were keen tomake it the very best it could be – transferring the culture of Cotswold Fayre and building on it