We believe that small is mighty, small is power. Our money, support and energy goes to David over Goliath every time...

And there are few more inspiring David's, so to speak, than Ruth, co-founder of HiSBE, a plucky, fighting, challenger super market in Brighton and Worthing, UK.

Our food system is broken- which includes much of how it's produced and where it's sold. Supermarkets have a crunch on the entire chain.

Inspired by the idea of 'how it should be', Ruth and team have re-imagined what a supermarket should be. And they're gunning for the big boys. With their sling shot.

In this episode, we talk food and supermarkets, imaginging 'how it should be' as a thought experiment / innovation prompt and moving from 'cute to dangerous'. Yes, you could to....

Links

• https://hisbe.co.uk/
• Ruth’s TEDx Brighton talk
• Unreasonable Group
• Ethical Consumer
• Sainsbury’s CEO’s pay triples to £3.8m as firm rejects living wage calls

Hello there.

Welcome to Peripheral Thinking, a series of conversations with

entrepreneurs, advisors, activists, and academics intending to inspire,

maybe challenge you with ideas from the margins of the periphery.

Why?

Because that's where the ideas that will shape tomorrow are hiding today.

On those margins, the periphery.

This week I spoke to Ruth Anslow.

Ruth is, uh, a truly inspiring entrepreneur and activist.

She believes strongly that business can be a force for good and is living that

out in the very real world of creating a supermarket to take on the supermarkets.

I hope you enjoy the conversation this week with Ruth.

Ruth, welcome to Peripheral Thinking.

Thanks for having me on here, Ben.

Thank you.

Um, so actually there's a little, there's a, there's a few kind of

brightened businesses who are, um, I've had the, the good fortune of, of

speaking to, uh, the last few days of seemingly all via a mutual friend of.

Uh, Vicky, uh, who runs Fugo PR, which I think is one of the

great connectors of the world.

And Vicky suggested you because maybe just give us a little bit of

overview of what you're doing now.

Uh, and we'll come back to that in more detail, but good to just

understand a little bit of what you're you are up to these days.

Yeah, sure.

So I'm, um, you know, passionately committed to

transforming business for good.

And, um, think we need to go around making new frameworks for

business that work for the future.

And in that, in that spirit, I, um, set about reinventing

supermarkets with my sister.

That was in 2010.

And co-founded a business called HISBE, HISBE Food.

And we are on a mission to create transformation in the food industry by

reinventing how supermarkets do business.

And, uh, also co-founded a business called The Good Business Club with

my friend, Sarah Oster, Holzer.

And that's very much about helping people who want to run or

support businesses like that, get together and work on it together.

So you've given birth to a, to a supermarket

Yes.

Uh, it's my baby,

Yeah, that is no small undertaking.

No, no, it's a bit boners.

I know.

But then there you have it.

That's what it, I, that's what it takes.

You know, you've got to be a bit boners and naivety is incredibly

important to getting anything done.

So Amy and I were fully qualified to, um, to get on with it.

Full power to the naive, I think that there's there's goodness in that.

So, um, maybe just take us back a little bit.

So you weren't always giving birth to supermarkets.

There was a, there was a time there was a time pre supermarkets.

What did that look like for you?

Well, I suppose it all started when I was 12 or 13, and then I decided

I wanted to be a businesswoman.

And I didn't know really what that meant, but I thought, oh, they earn loads

of money, drive, nice cars have good hair and good shoes, and I want that.

So, um, that set me on the path of GCSEs and A levels and university.

And I was very focused on getting into the world of business.

And with the degree I did, that meant going through a four year course, doing

international business, which I loved, and then applying for all the big corporates,

that was what we were funneled into.

So we were either going for big FMCG companies, like Cadbury Schwetz as

it was, and Unilever and Proctor and Gamble or banks, Deutscher

Bank, et cetera, or KPMG and Arthur Anderson as it was then, consulting.

So, yeah, I was funneled into that and I got onto the Unilever graduate

scheme, and I was there for four years in marketing and sales roles, negotiating

a lot with the big supermarkets.

That was my first insight to how that world runs.

And then I was another 10 years at Sarah Lee, quite a big deal in the world of air

fresheners, even if I say, say myself.

Um, and yeah, so I had that 14 year career in sales and marketing, very commercial

roles, met some great people, learned some great stuff, but got to the point

where it just, something was missing

So obviously we often sort of talk about these sort of moments as like,

cause I know from my own sort of story, in the retelling of them, we can

sort of imagine these things as quite sort of clean, quite sort of linear.

Uh, and the, the kind of process is sort of smooth.

But I, I kind of know the reality of life of my own journey, actually,

that transition of going from one track to another actually was quite

messy and also kind of rumbled along for quite a long time.

And I was kind of curious that, that, that sort of seed, that wish to be

doing something different, how long was that sort of growing, do you think?

I think you're right.

I think all the best things in life are a bit messy and so's kind

of changing your path and, uh, yeah, it wasn't a clear moment.

There were several moments of realization and thought and going, hang on a minute.

I don't think this is right for me.

Um, and, um, then there was a moment of epiphany where they came together and

then I started talking with my sister and she was having the same thing.

So yeah, there was probably an 18 month period.

There was sort of 2000.

Nine 2010 where it came together.

But yeah, there'd been a series of thoughts and experiences that got me,

got me looking at what I was doing.

Cuz I was basically on a path that I'd chosen when I was 12

which is part it's what we do.

You know, your eyes are put on a pass by your parents and you follow that or

you decide young and you follow that.

And until you entertain nothing changes.

But yeah, there was just a moment.

There was a moment.

I remember cuz I was an expat in Barcelona, had a

beautiful flat loads of money.

I was on the balcony, looking at the sea and having carved drinking Carver.

And I just had a crashing moment of realization that I wasn't happy.

I'd done all the things that I was supposed to do.

Um, and I realized, you know, work's a big part of my job and my, my identity.

I just wasn't fulfilled.

And there was a sense of meaning missing.

And that I realized in that moment, that's what I needed.

I needed to build in a sense of meaning if I was gonna work for

another 30, 40 however many years.

So, uh, yeah, there, there, but there, yeah, there were lots of

little thoughts and incidents and conversations that led up to that.

And then after that moment there was a year before I made any moves.

I started researching.

So I knew in that moment, I can't do this anymore for these reasons.

And, um, I started to think and shape what I did want to be and

what I did want to do, slowly.

And I, you know, did a lot of reading, did a lot of research, started talking

to people outside of the corporate world.

And, um, put together kind of what my values were and

what I actually wanted to do.

And talked a lot with my sister who was also, she had a very different

career, but was also dissatisfied at that point and unfulfilled.

Right.

I mean, how did you know what you wanted to do?

I, looked out for things that I could identify with and when I

came across, I'd always admired Anita Roddick and the Body Shop.

And when I came across her books, I got really into those and I started

reading Joanna Blythman as well.

And Joanna talks about injustices in the food industry and the proliferation

of big globalized brand and businesses in the food industry and what

that's done to the food industry.

So I, when I, when I think when you pick up something that

resonates, you really feel it.

So I really resonated with the idea of creating a business that had

purpose and meant something in the world other than just making, making

money, which is what Anita did.

And I resonated with let's tackle an injustice.

You know, let's look at some of this stuff that I'd come up against a

lot of stuff in the industry around food that I didn't think was right.

These little moments of realization of what goes.

And so, yeah, I think you need to, you know, there's nothing, unless you

make space to think and feel there's nothing new, that's gonna come.

So I made space and I started looking around me and I'd pick up things

and resonate with some of them.

And then through that exercise and through talking with Amy really got clear on,

oh, I want to be a social entrepreneur.

I want to be in business.

I wanna build a brand that stands for something I wanna, uh,

transform the world for the better leave something better behind.

We're here for a short time.

And to me, um, I want to make a difference.

I know not everyone does and that's fine, but I think that the people that do have

a little knocking on a door in a cupboard inside them and they ignore the knocking

and they ignore the knocking and then one day they have to open the door or

they ignore the knocking forever, you know, so I was just opening that door.

and yeah, and that's when Amy and I started designing what our vision

was, what we wanted to create.

And out of that months later came the idea of doing supermarkets.

And were you doing all of that while you were working?

Yeah.

So I was in quite a unique position, Ben, because what had happened is,

um, our division of the business at Sarah Lee was being bought by Proctor

and Gamble, and pro we had 18 months notice, you know, this is gonna happen.

It's a long way out, but it was very well managed, I must

say, in terms of a takeover.

Um, or an acquisition, you know, is the correct word.

So, you know, we had 18 months notice and I knew at that point that I didn't

want to go and work with Proctor and Gamble, because I wanted to get out

of FMCG and start my own thing, but I didn't know what it looked like.

But I had a quite a good period then of where we were, we didn't have

loads to do, because, you know, they were devolving responsibility from

what we were doing and we, you know, were preparing handover presentations

and things, but it was probably the slowest period I'd ever had at work.

And so I had space, um, to think, and didn't have to be, you know,

working 120%, a hundred miles an hour.

So that was very lucky.

And I also knew at the end of that period, I would get a payout.

I would, you know, if I left, I would get reasonably well compensated.

And then Amy came out to live with me for a while.

So she'd been living in Manchester.

And she was also for her own reasons, feeling this sense of lack of meaning.

And I said, look, you know, she was due to renew her lease.

And then she, I just said, look, come out and live with me.

And we did, we just lived in my flat and started just figuring stuff out

and what, and we wrote the values and we figured out what we wanna do.

Had all these great ideas and how are we gonna transform the food industry?

What does it mean?

We started researching the issues.

So we got really in depth into the problem before we, as, and we

developed the solution over time.

If you'd asked your 12 year old self, or maybe go to the 11 year old

self before you decided about the shoes and the hair and the job and

all that sort of stuff, is there a thread back that kind of made food?

The thing, or is it just food was a useful outlet for this will to

activism for want of a better word.

Um, we grew up in poverty and food was, you know, frozen food from B Jams.

And not much of it, and we know what it's like to go hungry.

And, and so I'd always been a bit really into food, but I didn't know how to cook

or chop a vegetable till I went to uni.

Um, so odd this odd relationship of not being enough food, being hungry

quite a lot, and over time, just loving food and getting really into

it, and the more money I got the, I spent spare money on food, basically.

It's amazing that I'm not a lot bigger than I am.

Um, cuz I eat like a horse, but anyway, I'm going off track.

The point was that, um, I started to learn in the food industry, how the supermarkets

have commoditized food and started engineering the goodness out of it.

And it really peed me off.

So particularly chicken pies.

I did a TED talk and I talked about chicken pies, but so I've tried this

story out a few times, forgive me.

But um, I found out, um, you know, I was waiting for my

buyer in one of the big, super.

Four years.

And he came bounding down the steps, really excited,

which never happened, ever.

And he, um, he said, I've just come out.

This really inspiring meeting about chicken pies.

And I'm like, wow, that sounds interesting.

Genuinely like interested.

And he said, we we've realized we can save millions because the chicken and

the chicken pies is just too good.

So the supplier had been putting grade a chicken in economy, chicken pies,

and they discovered this and realized that they could make the supplier

switch grade and charge the same to the consumer and pay less for the pies.

But eventually, basically they were downgrading the quality of the food.

And I'd grown up on frozen chicken pies.

And it was just this moment of, oh my God.

That's what people on low incomes have to put up with.

Deep degradation of chicken.

And it happened a lot in the nineties, this, um, category management, where they

go into whole categories, like quiches.

It happened with quiches.

It happened with pizzas.

They're going in and substituting good food ingredients for cheap stuff that's

basically cheap fats and chemicals and products that aren't really food.

You know, swapping cheese for analog cheese.

Swapping, uh, butter for odd vegetable fat derivatives.

And you end up with a product where the value has been engineered out of it.

And that's how they make food cheaper and cheaper and cheaper.

So whilst they're making it cheaper, they're also engineering

the goodness out of it.

And that had really started to get to me.

And I know what these big supermarkets do to their suppliers as well.

You know, I've been working at some of the biggest suppliers in the world, global

brands, and I knew how they treated us, and that was bad enough, you know, but you

find out how they treat smaller suppliers that really, really it's depend on them.

And that's not good.

So, you know, I got this sense of injustice of what was

going on in the food industry.

deeply.

And then my sister had, uh, decided she was gonna move from

Manchester to Brighton and she was going to do something different.

And she, um, found this, um, coffee company called Aromo.

And it was the first time we'd found a social enterprise,

like a live example of one.

And basically it will, Aromo comes from Ethiopia, which is some of the

best coffee in the world, and these guys had come over from Ethiopia, they

were bringing in coffee, direct from their mates back in Ethiopia, grinding

it in Manchester, made it into a brand and using the money to send their

kids to school and send back home.

Brilliant.

So anyway, she decided she was gonna sell that on a market store.

And we froze our tits off one, one winter in the marina selling

coffee on a market store.

But anyway, it was there that we started talking about the

origin and how it was made.

How it was made, how it was sold, how it was traded.

And I coined the phrase, that's just coffee how it should be.

And you know, we started looking at what it means to customers and you

know, what it means to the supply chain.

And then we were like, imagine if there was a shop where everything

you bought was just how it should be.

And that's where it came from.

That's what hippie stands for.

And that's where the idea started.

Again, it was little seeds of ideas that built over time.

And when we knew we'd hit something, we knew we'd hit something.

Because it just felt right.

It felt like, I've I've got this weird freaky philosophy about ideas.

I feel like transformational ideas are out there in the ether somewhere and we plug

into them, and we are vessels for them and to make them come out and be in the world.

And I've always felt like Amy and I were plugging into something, but like

the frequency wasn't always clear.

An idea would come and we'd work on it, but we just kind of felt at a visceral

level when it was right, and this is what we're supposed to be doing.

And this is what's gonna make a difference and it just felt right.

Yeah.

So it is a felt response, a felt recognition.

Yeah.

But you know, looking at it, I know that Amy and I are both

the same personality type, very driven by gut feel and instinct.

And you know, another personality type would probably approach it

differently, but that's how it occurs to us, and that's how we created

HISBE together right at the beginning.

And so the thing I like that phrase you used earlier about the, the

there's, there's something knocking inside the cupboard, an idea, knocking

inside the cupboard, a kind of a will to do something different.

And in a way there's some sort of journey going on.

That knocking is a search for that transformative idea that you can channel.

Exactly and something that creates personal meaning and

satisfaction for us as well.

So, you know, we were, we wanted to create a business.

We wanted to be working for ourselves, doing something of value

and meeting our own needs with it.

You know, our own needs to.

Be independent, be autonomous, be out there in the community.

You know, I'd lived quite a solitary life really, and I'd loads of mates.

And, but I was basically getting up early, going to my job, very long hours,

long weekends, and coming back, wolfing down some dinner, going to the gym,

you know, and well going to the gym, I make it sound like I did that a lot.

I didn't do that.

I mean, I went to the gym

I mean, I went a couple of times to the gym.

I had a membership.

Yeah, I, yeah.

Sorry about that.

I dunno what I'm thinking.

Um, but, um, yeah, it was a solitary life and I was very, just own, was

only socializing with my uni mates, who I love, and they're still, you know,

my best mates, and other corporate people in the corporate world.

But when you open a shop, well, one of the things we loved about working on

HISBE even before we opened the shop is that you get into the community, and

you're talking to customers or potential customers, and you're talking to people

who are trading on that road and you're talking to counselors and community

groups and people who care about stuff in the community, and it's just much

more real than being stuck in a room with a load of people with a BSC and an

interesting globalizing air fresheners.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

So, so what, so that, that, that, um, the, the kind of the birthing, the supermarket

elephant gestation period, you're talking there about, you know, speaking

to counselors, being in community, what did that journey look like?

So basically, um, I, um, took my redundancy in August, 2010, moved back

from Barcelona and Amy and I moved into a flat and Brighton and thought,

right, we need to get on with this, and constituted the company and clarified

our values and got clearer on the bit, started writing a business plan

started, we'd never been on Twitter.

I mean, Twitter was quite new, then believe it or not.

We were on Twitter, on Facebook, creating a brand, creating a

blog, doing all the things.

But it took us nearly three years to open the store, which at the time we never

would've believed if anyone had told us.

But it, it just, it took a long time to create the sourcing policies, to find the

right premises, to build a business plan that could stand up on its own two feet

and create the brand and engage people.

And there was, it was a long run up.

The hardest thing was finding the right premises.

I think if we, if we'd found the right premises a year earlier, we

would've opened a year earlier.

But it was really driven by the premises.

But a lot going on.

And also we had to find Jack.

Jack's the third founder, Jack Simmons.

He is the third director and he found us in 2013 just after

we got the keys to the shop.

And he is, if we are like, we are out there, yellow type personalities,

he's an architect of idea.

You know, he's one of those people who's brilliant at taking ideas and

making it work and building processes and ways for things to happen.

So, you know, he joined us a few months before the shop opened and he took our

sourcing policies and found all the suppliers and built the, the bricks of it.

And we needed to find, well he needed to find us.

And that, you know, that's why it took so long because that key

person needed to go through what they were going through to find us.

We got a keys to the shop in April.

We had about 15 grand in the bank and we needed 230, so that was a challenge.

And then Jack came along, I think, in the August and we opened in the December.

So it all happened quite quickly from that point, but yeah, it was scary

signing the lease because you're signing it in your own name, you

know, and Amy and I had signed up to this 15 year lease and we didn't have

enough money to fit out the shop.

So then we did a crowdfunder cuz we kept, you know, we got our business

plan out there to a lot of people and some people in, in the world

of real food and farming were very helpful, gave us lots of good advice.

And we took it to banks to get, you know, free sort of high street advice.

And it was clear that banks weren't gonna lend us the money.

And we did this crowdfunder to build some excitement around it and to, um, prove

that there was interest in it, proof of concept, and create a customer base.

That was in the April.

Shortly after we got the keys, we basically did a video where we stood

in the shop, going look at this, we are gonna turn this into Brighton's

ethical supermarket, I think, I think was the phrase we used at the time.

And this is what we're doing.

That's what we're doing.

If you're interested by vouchers and people bought money off vouchers

for a shop that didn't exist yet, which still makes me giggle a

bit, but people liked the concept and we raised 30 grand that way.

What was the concept that was resonating with people?

What was that?

The kernel, the idea, the seed?

It was about creating alternative to the big supermarkets.

So, you know, having something that was on London Road, which is quite a, was

quite a scrappy part of town, you know, we weren't talking about being in the

Lanes or, you know, the, I, people could see, we were trying to be accessible.

And just creating an alternative to the big supermarkets and

people hook into different things.

So a lot of people like what we do, because they like the idea of

supporting local farmers and suppliers.

Most of our fresh food is local from Sussex.

Or they like the idea that we pay fairly and we pay the real living wage and we

pay suppliers the prices they asked for.

Or they like the idea that some of it was packaging free or, you know, people

hooked into different elements of it.

But really, I think that what underscored it, it was a

different type of supermarket.

And we were the rebel supermarket.

We didn't use that phrase in our branding for three more years, but we were

rebelling against how a supermarket is.

We, you know, instead of how it is we, how it should be.

So essentially by buying from HISBE of course then I'm able to kind

of share in that rebel rebel idea.

Do you, is that a kind of core part of what keeps people coming now?

Yeah, I mean it is.

I think that there are, there are people who are very values led.

Especially in Brighton, there's a core group of people who are values

lead and come to us for those reasons, but others just come for convenience.

And now we have a, a shop in, in Worthing as well.

Um, and Worthing's a very different town to Brighton.

And you know, in Worthing they're less activisty, they're less into

rebellion and that sort of vibe there, but they're really into, um,

independent businesses, supporting local suppliers, very much into local economy.

And so, you know, there's examples there of two shops where you've

got customers who are driven by different things, but there's overlap.

There's in both cities.

There's a big group of people who want vegan food, or they

want, um, plastic free options.

They want to be able to buy stuff loose.

So it's hard to generalize, but I would say that the idea of rebellion is

not for everyone, and a lot of people just see us as a kind of a practical

alternative, because they are fed up with the way big supermarkets are.

Yeah, I mean, how important is the convenience aspect?

Like you were talking about your location in Brighton.

So there is a convenience thing it's like, oh, I'm walking past.

I need something.

There's an opportunity.

There's somewhere to get something.

So I go in, I mean, what, how kind of important on a sort of on the,

some sort of arbitrary scale is that?

In, supermarkets, it's the number one driver of customer behavior.

Yeah, people go to what's on their doorstep, and it takes something

to get someone, to walk past a supermarket to go to a different one.

So that's part of our job.

So our part of our job is to offer something that big supermarkets

can't do or won't do, so that some people walk past them to come to us.

And it's important for us to be located near to big supermarkets for that reason.

And our hope of course is that we are part of creating a shift towards going

outside and thinking a bit more outside convenience being the key driver.

And some people are on that journey and other people aren't.

Uh, and I'm curious, So, the extent to which, what you are doing is getting

the attention of the supermarkets.

uh, yeah.

Yeah.

They know who we are because, um, I've still got friends in FMCG, and I know we

talked about in boardrooms as an example.

Well, they see us as very niche and cute, of course.

Uh, they don't understand that we're working on growing from cute to dangerous.

Um, they, uh, they'll see us at some point.

So, you know, for example, a few years ago were invited, uh, by M&S.

They were holding a week called Retail Futures or something, and

they, they asked us to come along and present our journey and what we do.

And we've had the person who was heading up sustainability and

ethics in Waitrose gave us a call and we had a meeting with him.

Um, they're interested.

Um, and then Carrefour, you know, Carrefour um brought together their top

European team for a regional meeting and invited us in as on part of the agenda

to share what we do in our vision.

So we are on the radar and we are reported on.

You know, we've appeared in different industry reports and investment reports

by, by Barclay's Bank, by Social Enterprise UK, um, talked about by

Unreasonable as a breakthrough model.

And, um, the Ethical Consumer magazine.

I dunno if you know the Ethical Consumer organization, they're amazing.

They're going for decades.

And they research in depth.

They go in to product categories and research in depth the brands behind them.

And then they rank and score them on their ethical, practices.

Everything from, um, the way they treat people to where they invest their money.

And so you can go into the ethical consumer and look up anything from

coffee to mobile phones, you know.

And we use that in our sourcing policies, cuz we only, um, list brands that score

10 or more on the ethical consumer index.

But anyway, the point is that the Ethical Consumer ranks us number

two ethical supermarket in the country and that gets noticed.

So we score, I think it's, 12 out of 14, and Tesco, Sainsbury's, Asda and

Morrison's all score three or less.

Obviously they're big scale brands that score very low because they're

not working on these things.

And then we are the other end of the spectrum.

Very small, but showing that it is possible to run a supermarket another way.

The challenge of course is a convenience behavior change, right?

So.

How you get somebody to do something different to the track which is

laid down in their mind, of course.

So you are kind of wrestling with this in a really super, real way about,

you know, whether somebody chooses to turn right into your shop, left

into your shop, or keep walking.

But of course, this is a challenge for so many people.

How do you actually get.

to, to make a different behavior, to act in a different way?

Well, we kind of got five USPs if you like, that we do that.

Others don't.

And people generally gravitate to us for one of those reasons or walk, they'll

walk past Aldi for one of those reasons.

Uh, what the first one's local, you know, we, we have 53% of

our fresh producers from Sussex.

All the cakes and treats on our takeaway coffee bar are locally baked.

And, you know, we've got a big focus on supporting local producers.

It's really important to create food systems where we, we foster local economy.

And then the second thing is kind of ethics led anyone who's interested

in that idea of ethical brands.

We don't do the big brands.

You know, we don't sell Mars bars and Pot Noodles.

It's all the best alternative that we can find in those product categories.

So, you know, ethics led and we are, we are endorsed and

validated by external marks and.

certifications is the word I'm looking for, like Social Enterprise

mark and the Ethical Consumer.

And then, then the third one is sustainability.

So we really have a lot of great practices, like never throwing

away food that can be eaten.

We really take our sustainable options seriously, but looking for brands that

truly deliver that and think about that.

And, and it's difficult because there's so much about the food systems that's,

that's not sustainable that won't be around in 50 years time or shouldn't be.

The fourth thing is low waste.

So we recycle or responsibly dispose of anything in the shop.

I think our recycling rate's 90%, and that's really, really unusual.

We are preventing waste by selling stuff loose and out of plastic and allowing

people to bring their own containers.

And then the fifth thing is community spirit.

And you don't get any of these five things in a regular supermarket and

you don't get, you walk in and someone knows your name, or someone says hi,

or, you know, you just get people who are undervalued and underpaid

behaving like they're undervalued and underpaid in a lot of cases, you know?

Doing their best, but they're really overworked.

And you know, they're not very well respected and they're underpaid.

So you know, that doesn't foster great customer experience.

So yeah, that community vibe, or you go in there and you might see someone you know,

and the sense of being part of it all.

That's important.

So those are the things that would draw someone into our shop as

opposed to one of the big super markets that might be closer to them.

How are you, How are you communicating all of those things?

So we use social media to communicate those five USPs visually and

explaining, you know, when it is plastic for July, for example.

Showing off what we do in those five areas.

Sometimes it's just a funny picture of someone holding a

massive leak, you know, it's that.

Um, and then, um, we reach out a lot.

I do a lot of talks.

I do podcasts.

I try and spread the word of as much as we can about what we do.

But we don't have great big marketing and branding budgets to really get the

message out there, like Oatly style.

That's what I would love to do.

I'd love to be going Oatly style.

And, you know, doing kind of game changer communication, which is something

I'm thinking about at the moment.

But we would need to get money into that.

We've just come out of COVID and it's been in survival mode for two years.

So I don't think we get the message out about what we do enough and

I would love to change that.

Cause yeah, there's a, there's a, there's like a sort of

confluence of things isn't there.

There's like getting those messages out to the people who are walking

past you know, on some sort of journey essentially where, so it's

those two things together, isn't it?

You know, that's the, the sort of sweet spot.

That's right.

It's finding those people and you know, on my experience of trying to market

in the last two years with everyone just not, not, you know, they're not

interested, they've not been interested.

They've been focused on homeschooling kids, working from home, trying

to keep mind, body, soul together, you know, and getting through

COVID and all the pressures of it.

They're not, they've not been interested.

So it's been hard to cut through and, you know, at the moment we are looking

at how we can come out swinging with a really strong message, but it needs money.

And we are looking at moment and how to raise money for all that stuff.

So HISBE is a social enterprise.

Is that right?

So what does that mean sort of in practice for, for, for

what you are and how you do it?

Well, you know, when Amy and I were figuring out how to set up the business

back in 2010, we were kind of thinking, okay, what we need to do is encode

the values in the business and make sure that it's values and vision led.

You know, that it's always that way and that it's built

that way from the inside out.

And then we looked around and went, oh, that's called a social enterprise.

And yeah, it basically makes sure that the, the mission is baked into what you're

doing, and the values are very clearly running through the business, and, you

know, there's practical things that make sure you get the right investors in.

So, you know, whereas CIC, which is a community interest company, and

we can sell shares in our company, but there's a cap on the return they

can make over time and in dividends.

And that's just sensible because what that means is, is you're not going to

get VCs coming in, giving you 2 million and wanting it back three years later.

You know, it's, it's that kind of integrity and alignment with

the, the right kind of investors.

It sends, it sends a big signal to investors and partners that we want to

collaborate with about what we mean.

So yeah, in the day to day operating of the store, it just means that we

are thinking with our values as well as money, and they're equally important.

And sometimes you have to weigh one up against another a bit.

Something like COVID tests that, um, but yeah, other than that, because

we've always been a social enterprise, we don't really think about operating

as one, you know, we just are.

Uh, but you know, right.

For example, right from the beginning we paid the real living wage.

Staff got the Living Wage Foundation real living wage and whatever age they are,

whether they're 21 or 51 or whatever.

And that's really important.

And suppliers set their own terms.

And, you know, there are things that we've done from the

beginning that we've always done.

So I don't think of them as different anymore.

But a lot of it's about where the money goes as well.

So, you know, when you spend a pound at a big supermarket, they

keep only 5p in the local economy.

Big supermarkets, they centralize and export profit.

but when you spend a pound at HISBE, 58p stays in the local economy.

We spend it with local service providers and suppliers and staff.

And that's very key for future models of business.

We need to get a lot more localized in our business thinking, in my opinion.

So, you know, those are the things that go hand in hand with

us being a social enterprise.

If we didn't care about that stuff, we wouldn't have bothered

being a social enterprise.

Our prices would be a lot higher.

We'd pay staff a lot less.

We'd screw down suppliers and we'd behave very differently.

Uh, but yeah, but kind of, so writing a lot of that stuff into the

articles, um, kind of the particularly around sort of distribution of

profit, kind of lends a really good, clear focus to what you're doing.

Yeah, exactly.

And you get what you measure, you know.

Alongside the financial measures we measure, um, how much plastic

we save by selling stuff loose.

Uh, how many plastic bottles we save from landfill.

Um, how much of our stuff is local.

We have all these other measures that, that go alongside and you know,

what, how our, our brands rank on the Ethical Consumer, that go alongside

our non-social enterprises reporting.

Picking up a lovely phrase that you used earlier.

Your ambition is to move from the cute, to the dangerous.

And so I'm curious, what does cute to dangerous look like for you guys?

Yeah, people have always thought we're cute.

Me and Amy and our little business and our brand and our little shop.

That's fine, but that's not what we set out to do.

So we've set out to disrupt and create transformation in the food industry.

So when I say dangerous, I mean, creating a true threat to, to supermarkets so

that instead of kind of looking at us as a bit of an niche curiosity, they

get that there's a movement out there called localized food systems, which

needs to happen for the future of food, and that it's very real and that they're

not positioned to deliver that, and that there's, there's people in the market

who are delivering it and will grow.

So yeah, it's that shop our shop or shops like ours appear on every high.

And when you start talking about that kind of scale, it's dangerous.

So, you know, for example, you know, the, the food and drink market's worth 120

billion pounds a year, and it's dominated by the, the big supermarkets obviously,

they've all got double digit share.

And if you captured only a quarter of a percent of that market, you'd have a

500 million pound brand and 250 shops.

That's dangerous.

And that's what we're setting out to do.

It's easy for people to get disheartened when they're trying to take on

something, which clearly has such a huge fucking amount of power as

entrenched supermarket interest, right?

Because there is money, there's a lot of money.

There's a lot of systems which reinforce each other, which

keep that status quo as it is.

But of course, you know, the thing with all of these sorts of change, actually,

there is also vulnerability kind of built into it and like sand underneath the

foundations, if connections are starting to be made between pioneers and people

like yourself who are working towards an alternative vision, which is around

this kind of more localized systems, the disproportionate voice that you would

get through making connections, through bringing people together, so these kind

of things happening on, on high streets, up and down the country, even as one

or two little sort of things to start with, you know, relatively quickly, you

would've thought you start to become actually quite an inconvenience for

the purveyors of the convenience store.

Yeah.

and you know, I think that there are too many supermarkets in the market,

and it wouldn't surprise me if in the next 10 years, one of them fell

over or, you know, didn't make it.

They're always buying each others out or bits of each other anyway.

Because they're so oversaturated and they're all doing the same thing.

There's very little brand differentiation, with exception,

maybe of Waitrose, who do manage to create something a bit different.

so yeah, is there room in the market for all of the, the, the massive amount

of sameness that we've got going on, or will people demand more and get

to see that they're more as possible?

One of the other things I did, I did for some research

I was doing a few months ago.

There's the same number of food banks in the country as

there are Tesco supermarkets.

Yeah.

Which is, and the point around that is there is a shockingly high number

of food banks, and so, yeah, it's not the other way around, you know,

Yeah.

That's a very sad indictment on the failures in food and that's well,

it's, it's connected to so much.

There's also to do with poverty wages and you know, other things, but supermarkets

have got a responsibility there.

Are they going to start addressing some of this.

Or continue to see it as not their business?

And I think they're starting to channel their surplus food into some

of these things, which is great.

Big deal, they throw away so much food, and you know, they could do so much more.

I mean, they make billions and billions in profit.

And it's not all from food, you know, there's a, non-food there, there's also

a lot of money that comes from property.

You know, Tesco's massive property holders, these businesses are.

But at what point do you step in and go, no, this is part of a

problem that we've helped to make?

If you are, you know, if you are degrading the value of food and taking

goodness outta food, you're filling people's stomachs with stuff that doesn't

serve them and isn't nutritious and undercharging them for crap, and creating

health problems and selling them busy drinks and all the stuff that you wanna

sell them, cuz it's more profitable for you, you're part of the problem.

Because you know, if people are well fed, they would act and be very different.

So there's a, they, they just absorbed to themselves of responsibility and

created lots of problems for public health in the way they market and,

and the way the business models work.

The business models are all about short term profit, which means let's screw

as much as we can out of the customer and the supplier, and degrade the

quality of food that we, we can get more and more and more and more, more.

And overcharge for good food.

That's a whole other issue.

Overcharging for good food.

Oh God, now you've got me started.

Um, you know, CO2 emissions.

We need to, as we all know, drastically reduce these by 2030,

before we pass the point of no return.

And a third of CO2 emissions created by the food industry.

And 95% of where people buy food is the supermarkets.

So, you know, there's, there's the direct impact from their business model

is to create enormous amounts of carbon dioxide and pollution and environmental

damage, as well as making bad food normal.

That is a problem.

So, yeah.

Sorry, I've gone off on one, but the point is that if the food

system worked properly, as it needs to, and as it should, we

wouldn't need food banks anyway.

Hand in hand with addressing other levers of poverty.

And of course, wages is a big one of those and access to

educational, it's a huge thing.

It's shame on the food industry.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, if you took a fraction of the profit that they were making, you

could basically give an allowance.

As it was a fag packet calculation I was doing.

You just took a fraction of the profit that the supermarkets making on UK

operations you could give a credit to such an enormous number of people who

are currently having to get food from a food bank to get food from a supermarket,

And, pay your staff properly because you know, the thing with food banks, people

think it's, uh, people on no income.

No it's working people.

It, you know, most people using food banks are working.

They're just not paid properly.

And supermarkets are employing a lot of people throughout the supply

chain and not paying them properly.

And there was a big thing in the, um, the news recently where the chairman

of Sansbury rejected implementing the real living wage and put his own bloody

salary up three times or something.

It's a system meeting itself.

Ruth, thank you very much.

Where can people find more?

Yeah.

Um, follow us on social media.

Um, HISBE is HISBE Food on Instagram and Twitter and Facebook.

I'm on LinkedIn.

I bang on about this stuff a lot on LinkedIn.

Come and find us.

And our website is hisbe.co.uk.

And come into our stores and make up your own mind and see what you think.

Ruth, thanks so much for your time.

Really appreciate you talking to us.

it was a pleasure.

Thank you for having me on here.

A real pleasure.

Thank you.

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We really appreciate your energy, your contribution.

uh, so thank you.

Thanks for listening.

Thanks for sharing.

Thanks for doing all those things.

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