Now this is the big question, but please read on, because it really matters …
The Potato Shop is one of the businesses that operate on the Morghew Park Estate, which is a substantial agricultural operation located in beautiful Kentish countryside south west of Tenterden. The Estate has grown potatoes for at least 100 years – so there’s a long tradition of potato-growing here. The Estate has a mission statement which is all about a notion of service to the local community – employing local people, feeding local people and providing a high-quality leisure and recreation resource for Tenterden and the surrounding villages.
My name’s Tom Lewis, and I took the Estate over in 2001, by which time potato growing had fallen on hard times, with nearly 100% of the Estate’s output going to the supermarket packers at no more than break-even prices. Well, farming can be a fairly soul-destroying business if all the produce leaves the Estate in articulated lorries. Even more so if it ends up on the shelves of supermarkets hundreds of miles away, on sale to folk who are unlikely to have heard of Tenterden, let alone Morghew.
If there are three words that sum up our philosophy, they are LOCAL, LOCAL and LOCAL. Our potatoes are grown just south of Tenterden. They are cultivated, harvested, packed and delivered by people who live in or near Tenterden. Many of my staff have lived here all their lives. And a substantial proportion of our potatoes are consumed by people who live in and around Tenterden.
Whereas supermarket potatoes have nearly always travelled hundreds of miles in the back of an articulated lorry (that’s if they haven’t been imported from overseas), our potatoes come with SINGLE DIGIT FOOD MILES between the field and the point-of-sale. About three to be precise.
Our honesty stall is CONVENIENT. It’s open every day of the year from 8am – 8pm, and you can park your car about four yards from the stall – and just load the potatoes into the boot. That makes a nice change from having to carry or push them across a car park the size of a small aerodrome.
It’s DIVERSE. When did you last see 12 different varieties of potato on sale in one place?
It’s STIMULATING. Our customers can try a different potato variety every week. A lot of them do.
In short, our Potato Shop operation is ENVIRONMENTALLY SOUND, it’s SOCIALLY SOUND and it’s WHOLESOME through and through. This is how fresh food used to be distributed in rural and semi-rural areas of this country, and in an era of global warming and high fuel prices, we think it’s the way it needs to be done again. We hope you agree.