A Full Circle food delivery made Good Friday even better
“The home delivery service was always what we wanted to do, we just brought it forward,” said Full Circle director Paul Richardson as he dropped off an online order in his electric car today (Good Friday).
The order - which included pasta! - was for a range of items from the Full Circle website including spices, pulses, gravy granules, rice, flour, fudge (it’s Easter) plus the fabled spaghetti, penne - and four ciabattas.
“They’re fresh today,” says Paul, maintaining appropriate social distancing procedures for my first face-to-face Cambridge Independent interview since the lockdown started. “Our baker gets up at 3 in the morning to bake the ciabattas - Jess Humble, she’s based in Newmarket.
“Humble Foods is her business name. Part of what we want to become is a curator of local businesses, acting as part of the ecommerce community and for delivery services for them. It’s curated to a degree, the suppliers have to meet our ethical standards, and it helps provide the range of things we don’t do, such as fresh fruit and veg.”
Full Circle’s main warehousing facility is in Ronald Rolph Court at the top of Wadloes Road.
“There’s a nice community of like-minded businesses growing there including Zero Waste Path, Bee Bee Wraps and Cambridge Fruit Company,” notes Paul.
The company, which started trading in 2018, is currently delivering about 20 orders a day. The cachment area is CB1 to CB5, plus Histon and Impington - “we started off here so we have a lot of loyalty to the community,” Paul says. There’s a delivery rota - CB1 on Monday, CB2 on Tuesday and so on. Being based in CB5, my order arrived this morning after I ordered on Wednesday. Histon and Impington get their deliveries on Saturdays. Otherwise, you might want to order on the website and pick up your order from the company’s Norfolk Street premises - the market stall is currently not functioning.
“We offer a delivery service or a click and collect option,” said Paul. “The click and collect staff are at our Norfolk Street shop doing the packing. There’s a table in the front of the shop for collection.”
They do say that the best time to start a new business is during a recession. Companies launched during hard economic times include IBM (1896), General Motors (1908), Disney (1923), Virgin (1972) and Microsoft (1975). If you can build a business during hard times people will remember you were there for them when things improve - or if they improve, in our case.
“It’s great,” said Emily Scialom of the delivery. “Genuine people, great products, excellent service. As a society we’ve been coasting along for years with abnormal patterns of consumption, it’s time to get normal and all this is really helping.”
“What we’re doing now with home delivery and collection is sustainable and we want to grow it,” concludes Paul. “We’re turning a negative into a positive and using this as an opportunity to really nail this. We’re thinking carefully about how to retain customers and do our best to create customer loyalty so they’ll continue using our services. We’re very grateful and humbled by people placing their faith in us.”
