Harvest Fine Foods’ operations are improving after the initial shock of losing 85% of its customer base overnight due to the coronavirus crisis, with the foodservice wholesaler now possessing 8,000 registered members of the public on its system and revenue back up to around 75% on the pre-pandemic daily figure.
“Things have got a little crazy for us here,” explained sales and marketing director Steve Whitwam. “After the initial shock, we set up within a few days our Home Delivery service. This took off really quickly and we now have around 8,000 registered members of the public on our system. We are still getting about 300 new registrations a day.”
Read more: Harvest Fine Foods is sustaining ambitious growth
In terms of overall revenue, Whitwam explained that Harvest has had had a couple of days that have been like normal foodservice days, but overall most days are trading at around 75% of the previous figure.
“The local radio station also picked up on the fact we were offering Blue Light Workers a 10% discount and I have been on the local radio twice now promoting that,” said Whitwam. “Last week we also put on some charity donation buttons on our site for Fareshare Southampton who are the local food distribution point the homeless and vulnerable, to date we have raised over £800 for them.”
He continued: “Some of the biggest challenges we have had are around changing a web site that wasn’t supposed to be used for B2C selling to make it friendly in that environment, we are still developing this every day and refining how we sell on it. The feedback we have received from the public has been amazing with one resident telling us that the quality of goods we have supplied him is better than what he would buy from M&S.”
