A Perthshire garden centre has put food provenance and stocking local produce top of the list as it opens its new food hall today.
Glendoick Garden Centre, near Perth, has seen a flurry of activity in recent months as a completely new food and drink offering has been created.
Owner / director Jane Cox is thrilled to be reopening after months closed due to restrictions put in place during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.
“It is really nice to be doing something,” she said. “We have spent so many months being stagnant, sitting waiting for us something to happen with the Scottish Government guidelines – you can, you can’t open.
“It has actually given me energy in the last few months and as we approach opening, it’s just the pure excitement of actually opening.”
Key changes
Changing the food hall part of the business to what she believes is more of a food offering was a key part of the plan Jane had envisaged.
“I think our food hall before was sort of a gift food hall. Someone would come to the café and on their way out they would buy some shortbread and some strawberry jam. That is maybe a little exaggeration but it had a gift element to it,” she said.
“Now I want to produce something where you can actually buy a full meal. You can buy the vegetables, the meat, the pasta, the rice and the wine to go with it.
“But I also felt you would have basics like the Heinz tomato soup, the baked beans, the cereal – the things you would need in an everyday food shop.”
It’s taken a few months for the centre to go from the inception to opening and has involved a lot of work, including creating a new app that will be used in the café and has helped free up space previously used for queuing.
“We started about three months ago,” Jane added. “I moved entire departments like the book shop the toy shop and the food hall into a completely different place.
“I am introducing an app for when the café opens again. We used to have a queuing system where you would queue, order at the till and it would be brought out to you.
“That will no longer be the case, you can go and sit at the table, download the app from the QR code, order and pay at the table and we will bring the food out to you.
“I have a large space where there used to be queuing taking place that is no longer necessary so the food hall has expanded into there. It has grown in size, and it is also in a different place.”
Local is vital
When it came to stocking food and drink available to sell in the newly-refurbished food hall, using local producers and suppliers was at the forefront of Jane’s mind. Knowing the provenance of her produce was top of the list.
“Local has been key. For me, supporting local is vital because I want people to support me, so we need a reciprocal arrangement and a collaboration with local growers and local producers,” she said.
“I’ve got dozens of them. Yesterday I was doing a blackboard with a list of the local growers, producers and suppliers which is a big list. When you come out of the café and into the food hall there is a big list for everyone to see.
“I think that’s really important now and it’s not something that you get in a supermarket. It is about seasonality, it is about local, it is about food miles, those things are really important, and what we can do for a USP that’s different.
“And with that comes good taste, not good taste as in poshness, but good taste as in this tomato or this strawberry is from around the corner so it tastes better.”
Home-baking
They will also be using their in-house specialists too, to add more delicious home-produced items for sale.
“I am going to do baking as well. We will bake off some bread and some rolls, the necessary stuff that you need every day,” Jane continued.
“Our chef makes fantastic sausage rolls in all sorts of different flavours, so we are going to start with that and maybe extend that.
“We are going to do quiches, and we are very famous for our soup, and the one that people particularly like is lentil soup, so we are going to be offering that to begin with and if that works we will increase that as well.”
