It’s been a while since we moved to South London from Crouch End. Astronomical prices and crazy commutes forced us into a migration. I love many things about our new area; wonderful places like Morden Hall Park are a stone’s throw away with the best leaves to kick through. I do miss one thing about Crouch End though which is something I never thought I’d miss… Budgens.

When we first moved to Crouch End in 2002, Budgens was the worst supermarket I’d seen in a while. It was seriously depressing. Then in 2006 something amazing happened. It became a franchise with an enlightened soul called Andrew Thornton taking it on and turning it into something akin to a covered market. The process seemed to be quite agile (in the software sense). After the initial reopening there was a series of smaller reinventions with a constant move towards locally sourced products and organic/English products. Labelling helped dramatically to find only fruit and veg which had travelled less than 100-miles. Even the majority of frozen ready meals was from the Cook range which is renowned for high quality and locally sourced (where possible) ingredients. 

Furthermore each of these small inventions seemed to be very much market lead and involved listening to local shoppers. Crouch End is fairly vocal, as well as being a bit of a place for luvvies (you can barely move without tripping over a former East Ender), with a constant sense of campaigning for causes such as animal rights, global warming and stop the war. So by listening to a vocal local group Andrew and his staff were tuning each iteration of the store’s reimagination in a very agile-software-development-like way. They even had an excellent e-mail newsletter and responded to personal e-mails.

Is the store more profitable than some of the Sainsbury/Tesco style centrally driven behemoths? I don’t know, however it is clearly working well enough for Andrew to have opened a second franchised store in Belsize Park.

Why am I talking about this at the moment. I guess it comes down to my weekend experience with Tooting Sainsbury’s. I’m a massive rhubarb crumble fan. Forced rhubarb is definitely in season. For those of you thinking that spring is the natural time to be eating rhubarb, you’re right, however you can “force” it where it is grown in dark heated sheds. Forced rhubarb requires less sweetening and is a lot brighter pink in colour with much softer thinner stems. It is just the best in my opinion, and although yields are down it’s still doing well for growers who are mainly in Yorkshire. However no rhubarb in sight in Sainsbury’s, whereas even bad old pre-franchise Budgens had it. No one could tell me when it was going to be in again if eve. No one was interested in taking note of the fact that I’d like to buy some so they could keep a tally and if there was a market get some in. I may be a lone voice asking for that particular thing, but there didn’t even seem to be a system or interest in registering my interest. Sainsbury’s purchasing strategy seems top down and waterfall at best.

This really puzzles me, are big supermarkets so tied up in making one size fits all situations that they are forgetting local forces? I know I’m not a majority audience in Tooting for sure, but if there are no channels for communication then there is no way of tuning the product to be most efficient, whatever that may be. Also I just can’t see the justification for the “world of fruit and vegetables” approach which has apples coming from far afield when we have some fantastic varieties which grow here.

I’d love to vote more efficiently with my feet but Sainsbury’s has a monopoly in Tooting apart from two Tesco Metro’s and we gave up our car for eco-reasons. Fascinatingly the monopoly is an identical situation to Budgens in Crouch End which until the arrival of a Tesco Metro next door had no competition at all within The Broadway. The difference between gaining the love of a customer and losing one is clearly listening and providing for what they really need. Guess it’s time to buy a hopefully cool wheelable shopping trolley and go hunting for more locally sourced produce, and hopefully not sound like Victor Meldrew complaining about rhubarb or the lack thereof.