Supporting the Community
Over the last weeks and months since the Covid-19 restrictions have come in to force we have seen a significant increase in the demand for our veg boxes. This was in part due to the fact that our main outward facing enterprise the Clervaux Café and Bakery in Darlington whereby we supplied the kitchen with fresh produce on a weekly basis and where we also had a veg stall for customers to buy from directly was closed temporarily.
Up until the week ending 24th April the previous 5 weeks had seen a total of 415 vegbox orders processed generating a total turnover of £8368.72. However, this was only achieved through a total of £5060.75 worth of bought in organic produce from Organic Pantry as the surge in demand for vegboxes came at the start of the UK hungry gap. In addition, we have 70 vegbox orders for the first week of May.
This led us to review our vegbox offer due to the significant increase in demand so we decided to ask customers to refrain from ordering if they were able to attend the supermarkets themselves and also that we would be only offering a Tuesday and Thursday delivery every fortnight as opposed to weekly which had been the norm previously.
This huge effort was only achieved by the tremendous effort of the team at Clervaux where teamwork, creativity and hardwork came together to support some of the most vulnerable in our community who were self-isolating and struggling with their food provision. We have in part been helped by our residents and day-placements Saskia, Sally-Ann, Glen, Patrick and Connor in assisting with the packing and delivering of vegboxes to people’s homes.
We soon outgrew the space in our existing wooden packing shed and so in line with the spirit of the times we have set up our marquee outside of the packing shed in order that we were able to accommodate so many boxes and also provide more room for staff, residents and students to manoeuvre during packing. In order that the produce wasn’t perishing by being sat in the marquee for too long we were doing as much of the preparation on the day prior to the delivery and then the majority of packing would happen on the morning of the delivery with the delivery vehicles setting off in convoy as soon as possible afterwards. This in part required the takeover of the school kitchen so apologies to our school cook Jane ahead of your return.
In order to logistically work out the best route for each delivery and each driver we have started using an online route planning software which has now been aided going forwards by the addition of three TomTom satnav systems for each Clervaux vehicle that was fundraised by Bethan through the Tesco Bags of Help grant.
In order that the land team were able to fulfil our offer of bespoke vegboxes delivered door to door in the Darlington and surrounding villages area we were and still are being helped significantly on the land by the redeployment of some of the Clervaux café staff in the form of Claire, Chloe and Greg not to mention our administrator Sue and cleaner Dorne who have also helped in numerous ways. We even had the good will gesture of our furloughed green woodworker Chris also pitching to volunteer one day a week as well as a couple existing vegbox customer offering their time in anyway. We have also been supported every step of the way by our executive head Gavin so thank you to everyone who has contributed their time during the Clervaux vegbox Covid-19 response.