With the coronavirus crisis forcing cafes, restaurants and pubs to close, food wholesalers have switched to selling to the public.
As the fourth week of lockdown begins, supermarkets are still running out of some products, delivery slots are all but snapped up and restaurants, pubs and cafes remain closed.
But one type of food retailer is finding that this is their unlikely moment to shine – the humble wholesale warehouse.
Largely unnoticed by the general public, in normal times an army of refrigerated vans belonging to around 30 Scottish wholesalers criss-cross the country daily to supply the nation’s restaurants, hotels, cafes, schools, care homes and oil rigs.
Now, with up to 80% of their usual trade disappearing overnight and large quantities of stock languishing in store rooms, some wholesalers in the north of Scotland and Tayside have turned their attention to home deliveries, with varying degrees of success.
It’s been described as a win-win, allowing them to stay afloat and keep employing staff during a global crisis, while households are able to get food delivered in as little as 24 hours.
Some of those who are ahead of the game include Les Turriff, a supplier of fruit and vegetables across Tayside, Fife and Aberdeen, Inverness-based Swanson Foods who deliver to Nairn and Elgin, and Aberdeen-based fruit and vegetable wholesaler Veitch Moir.
Les Turriff managing director Andrew Turriff said: “The bulk of our customer base is usually the catering trade such as hotels, restaurants, cafes, and also care homes, farm shops and greengrocers. But obviously after lockdown happened almost everything closed, so that was going to have an impact on us – we’ve seen a 40% drop in business orders.
“We’re still supplying some care homes, shops and takeaways, but that wasn’t going to be enough to allow us to keep going and keep all of our staff working.
“At the same time we also saw that supermarkets were struggling with demand and that many people, especially the elderly, were struggling to get delivery slots. We realised we could supply household customers to plug the gap. We were getting enquiries from members of the public, asking if they could buy from us.
“The problem with supermarkets is that their orders are planned weeks in advance, so if they have a sudden spike in demand for something, they can’t just order in five additional boxes of potatoes, for example.
“Their pipeline is more complicated, with more admin and pre-planning, whereas we have more flexibility and are able to react quicker as we deal directly with growers and farmers, many of whom are local – in summer, 30% of our produce is local.
“We also have a large fleet of 12 vehicles.
“We realised that we have the structure, the vehicles and the systems to allow us to do home deliveries.”
Pre-lockdown, Les Turriff mainly took business orders over the phone, but in just four days staff set up an online shop where household customers could select their chosen items from a list, pay online and have their shopping delivered in a cardboard box outside their door, with delivery drivers observing the recommended two-metre distance.
Waiting times vary from a few days to a week, with a minimum required spend of £20.
Although their main products are fruit and vegetables, Les Turriff also sells milk, bread, cheese, flour, honey, soft drinks, canned food and other cupboard staples.
The range and choice of brands is narrower than what is available at supermarkets, but Andrew explained that he plans to expand the product range with a view to continue home deliveries after the lockdown is lifted.
“We’ve had huge success with the deliveries– the response has been immense”, he said.
“Bananas, tomatoes, mushrooms and milk are particularly popular products. We’ve become sort of a mini online supermarket.
“We’re still learning, adapting to what customers want and working out how to serve them best, and as time goes on we’ll add more and more product lines. We’re looking to promote more local producers, such as makers of jam and other preserves, so hopefully we’ll have those products in stock soon.
“We hope to keep going with home deliveries after the lockdown is over, and we hope many of the customers we have now will stick with us.
“Without home deliveries we would have had to reduce our staffing levels – we have 40 workers including pickers, packers and delivery drivers, and we used to get 2000 business orders a week whereas we now we have less than half of that.
“Doing the deliveries has allowed us to keep all the staff and we’re keeping afloat for now, it probably won’t be enough long-term but we’ll keep adjusting to the situation as we go along.”
Further north, Veitch Moir, an Aberdeen-based wholesaler employing 12 staff, switched from supplying fruit and vegetables to restaurants, hotels, ships and oil rigs to delivering variety boxes to households.
Currently the family-run company is fulfilling between 200 and 250 domestic orders a week, with the heaviest demand from customers in Aberdeen city centre, Newtonhill and Stonehaven.
Veitch Moir owner Kevin Tait said he’s still in the process of setting up an online ordering system, but for now customers can order and pay over the phone.
“We’re still quite early on in the process of working out how best to supply households”, he added.
“At the moment people can’t pick and choose what’s in the boxes. They can order a fruit box or a vegetable box and we will select the items based on what’s in season and what we have available.
“The fruit boxes have things like apples, bananas, pears, melons, plums, kiwi. The vegetable ones have potatoes, carrots, leeks, onions, kale, cauliflower, peppers, butternut squash and more.
“Customers say they like the surprise element, some of it isn’t what they’d normally buy so they’ve been looking up different recipes to make use of it all – for example, not everyone knows what to do with kale but because it’s in the box they have to find a use for it.
“We recently had an order from an 83-year-old woman who was self-isolating and would have struggled to get out to buy food, and we were able to help her. It’s things like this that make it all worthwhile.”
With business orders few and far between, the company’s five vans would have had few journeys to make were it not for the fruit and vegetable box deliveries.
Whereas before their workload varied from week to week, drivers are finding that there is more of a structure to the way they deliver during the lockdown.
Kevin added: “Pre-lockdown, some days we’d have an order for a few thousand pounds’ worth of items, and on another day it could just be a few small boxes of stuff, it really varied.
“Now we have a system where the vans will go out to deliver to a certain area on a certain day. For example, in Stonehaven it’s every Wednesday.
“We couldn’t have kept up with our overheads without the home deliveries. We’re still getting orders from businesses such as oil rigs but not nearly as many as before the lockdown.
“Possibly we’d have had to let some staff go and I’ve never paid someone off in my life, so I didn’t want to start doing that now. Home deliveries won’t keep us going forever but for now they’re helping us cope. We’ll 100% keep them going after all this is over.”
In the Highlands, fresh food wholesalers Swanson Foods lost 80% of their business overnight when the lockdown started and were particularly affected by the closure of schools, of which they were a major supplier.
To keep the business going, owner Magnus Swanson decided to start delivering fruit and vegetable boxes and is now introducing a new range of bakery, meat and dairy boxes, with customers receiving a selection chosen by the company depending on availability.
With a fleet of 16 vans, Swanson’s is able to deliver to homes within 24 to 48 hours compared to the weeks of waiting that supermarket customers are having to endure.
Magnus said: “Supermarkets were already delivering to full schedule before coronavirus, and they now have up to ten times more demand than usual, so they can’t cope with that.
“On the other hand most of our business went overnight – we did always welcome members of the public to shop from us but 99% of our orders were wholesale from hotels, restaurants and schools. We had the contract for every school in Highland and Moray, so when they closed we lost a lot of business.
“But we couldn’t close because we still have care home contracts and independent shops to supply, so we thought we’d encourage more members of the public to shop from us.
“We put out a post on our Facebook page and our premises were immediately jam-packed with customers. A lot of people had been struggling to buy things like pasta, rice, toilet paper and milk from supermarkets because of all the panic-buying, so they came to us.
“We decided it wasn’t safe to have that many people in, so we set up an online system where customers select their choice of variety box, then we call them and arrange payment and delivery.
“We’ll manage to stay open for the foreseeable future, but we have still had to furlough five of our 43 staff. Home deliveries have definitely helped us but it’s not a going to solve everything.”