Football, the Budget and Food

Well, as least the country can relax for a few days as England played better and we haven’t embarrassed ourselves as much as France at the World Cup.  As I have mentioned before, the two other World Cups I have been running my own business, have been miserable affairs as far as turnover was concerned.  So far, however, this has not been the case in 2010.  Thank goodness for that as we had enough bad news in the budget this week to make up for lack of misery elsewhere.

The biggest impact for food businesses would be the increase in VAT to 20%, but at least this doesn’t kick in until 2011 – and allows us a free run up to Christmas 2010.  Talking of which our advance sales of Christmas orders are well up on the last year – and more indicatively the average order is up on last year.  This implies a continued sense of optimism in Speciality Food growth over the next few months – and may it continue long after that!  Helped most recently by some splendid weather, growth in garden centres and farm shops remains stronger than ever – and I really believe good, comprehensive food offerings in this sector will start to eat away at the dominance of the supermarkets in some regions.

It seems to be the “in-thing” to slate customer loyalty schemes in the independents recently with yet another article appearing in the latest Fine Food Digest issue.  Operated correctly, I still believe this can be used effectively to drive increased business from existing customers and, perhaps more importantly, the get new customers through the door.  I am working with a farm shop in Oxfordshire that is currently implementing a scheme to do just that.  Having a large e-mail database of customers will help them as they offer incentives to those customers to pass on a voucher to those who aren’t current customers. I will let you know how it goes.