How We Started

Having spent the last 6 years running our own retail business, supplying ex-pats with those dearly missed British products in the Poitou-Charentes region of France, we like to think we know the business inside out.

With humble beginnings at our local indoor market and a few of the usual favourites, we soon found the demand was high for chilled/fresh products. As you know, every retailer’s nightmare (particularly anyone trying to supply chilled produce in France) is getting stock levels right and we eventually managed to overcome this through small regular deliveries from the UK. This allowed us to have a quick turnover of goods, with minimal waste and very importantly it allowed us to have a varied stock range, which was key to our success. Our customer’s knew that whilst we would always have their favourite sausages or cheese, they could always expect something new and different. Consequently our customer’s would return week on week.

The popularity of our Devon Rose sausages was renowned and we regularly had new & existing customers travelling some distance just to buy them. We tried a number of UK suppliers and British producers in France, and found that there was just no comparison. From the sausages and bacon, we then found our range increasing to include chipolatas, gammon steaks and black pudding. We were also providing steak, beef joints, cooked hams to order – the list is endless. Christmas orders were colossal and even included Devon Bronze turkeys and turkey crowns.

Finding ‘Chunk’, our award winning supplier of Pies and Pasties, was our second huge success. In the end, we were offering over 5 different varieties of individual pies, their award winning beef pasty (Best Pasty in Britain), 4 other varieties of pasty (including vegetarian) and not forgetting one of the best pork pies you will taste (stocked by Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall in his River Cottage Shop). We never had to worry about over ordering as the shelves were never full for long.

And lastly, but by no means least, was Windyridge Cheese (so good that we had British holidaymakers buying up our stock to take back home to the UK!). Whilst there were other avenues open to us to buy certain ‘well known’ brands of cheese from French distributors, we found the delivery charges and minimum order amounts high. Again we wanted to be able to offer our customers something a little bit different to everyone else – and we certainly got this with Windyridge (Somerset producers of quality handmade cheeses). Be it with their ‘Hot, Spicy, Chilli, Garlicky’ range, their ‘Tasty’ Cheddars or delicious Stilton and Dorset Blue Vinny. Christmas also saw the arrival of their dartboards (8 different handmade flavoured cheeses in the shape of a dartboard). You won’t believe the prices.

So armed with our fabulous trio, our business went from strength to strength and resulted in the opening of our shop ‘Home Sweet Home’ in June 2008. With our new premises the business thrived and reached a much larger audience of ex-pats, tourists and of course the French themselves. It wasn’t long before we had converted our French customers to cheddar cheese and smoked back bacon!