The recession has hit organic vegetable boxes hard, but one producer is fighting back with an army of cooks

Since 1991, when the Devon pioneers Tim and Jan Deane, of Northwood Boxes, began selling everything from celeriac to melons direct to local customers, organic veg boxes have become a booming trend. By 2007 more than 550 schemes were supplying some 400,000 homes across the UK, with householders from North London to North Berwick signing up for weekly deliveries of organic fruit and veg. But the recession has dented this progress.

When cash is tight, you don’t want tatty red cabbage and musty swede ending up in your bin. And with a hungry family to feed at the end of a long day, what use is that knobbly artichoke if you don’t know how to cook it?

Sales of organic home deliveries, including box schemes, fell by nearly £1 million in a year, according to the Soil Association’s 2009 Organic Market Report, and some schemes are struggling. The awardwinning Warborne Organic Farm in Hampshire has ended its box scheme and closed its farm shop. This month, one of the market leaders, Abel & Cole, sent out a mailshot offering potential customers goods worth £50 if they signed up for four weeks of boxes. To hang on to their customers, businesses are being forced to get creative.

Now Riverford Organic, the UK’s third largest veg box company, plans to get to the root of the problem. Riverford, based in Devon, sends boxes of its own meat and dairy products as well as veg and fruit to 60,000 households nationwide. Between 2003 and 2007, its sales doubled. Then, as competition increased and the recession began to take hold, the sales graph fell flat: the boom was over.

“It was like a tap had been turned off,” says Guy Watson, the company’s founder and chairman. So he decided to visit customers and find out what could be done to tempt people to stay.

Something he soon discovered was that many people didn’t know what to do with the produce they had ordered: “I realised that we had been focusing too much on growing, when the cooking was much more important.”

Riverford is recruiting 100 freelance cooks from around the country to help to teach people how to “think inside the box”. It has already gathered a group of 20, including chefs who have worked at restaurants such as Moro in London and Chez Panisse in California, as well as cookery teachers and private cooks.

Over the past four months, the embryonic Riverford Cooks project has been experimenting with ways to get customers more engaged in cooking with seasonal vegetables. There have been restaurant and supper club events at which customers pay £25-£35 for a three or four-course meal based on Riverford produce, as well as food demonstrations and “chop and chat” sessions. Another innovation is the lunch chain, where customers cook from a veg box in their kitchen with the help of a chef for free, then invite friends over to sample their creations — and, it is hoped, sign up to a box scheme: a kind of eco-foodie version of an Ann Summers party, only with root vegetables instead of sexy lingerie.

Lastly, there are plans for a yurt to tour the country this summer from its base at Riverford’s five sister farms and four other sites, providing a distinctive venue for demonstrations and seasonal meals. The idea is that it should be a mobile version of the convivial, award-winning farm café, the Field Kitchen, at Riverford HQ, where people share tables and platters of food.

At a two-day “cook camp” at the company’s main farm, near Buckfastleigh, recruits to Riverford Cooks gather for a brainstorming session with Guy Watson and his siblings — Rachel, who runs marketing, “Mr Meat” Ben, and Oliver and Louise, who are part of the dairy team.

Rachel begins by asking the group what the biggest stumbling block is for cooks. “Time,” they reply. As one puts it: “Most people have only 30 minutes to cook when they come back from work. They want it to be simple but they don’t want boiled broccoli night after night.”

The solution, they decide, is to produce several simple recipes, adaptable to whatever is in the box, that can be showcased at their various cooking events. They will emphasise the qualitative difference in taste between the organic and processed options. “I never buy convenience food — it’s horrible,” says Sylvain, a Moro-trained chef who has run some of the Riverford lunches and suppers in London. “That’s why it’s called convenience food, not good food.”

After their brainstorming session, the assembled hosts and visitors stride uphill to survey fields of radicchio, celeriac, carrots and a watercress substitute called land cress, which is so peppery that you need only a third of the usual quantity to make a potent soup. Then, after much hosing of muddy wellington boots, they sit down to lunch in the Field Kitchen. The menu could be termed “meat and at least nine veg” — free-range duck accompanied by creamed parsnips, purple-sprouting broccoli, grilled leeks with garlic, chilli and hazelnuts, a sweet and sour dish of roasted beetroot and carrots, and a potato and cavolo nero hash.

After lunch the cooks practise their demonstrations, from the best way to clean leeks to what to do with kale and the various merits of celeriac. Then they all have a chance to make their own supper using the veg boxes.

Hilary, who cooks at the Womad festival, creates a purée of Jerusalem artichoke, potato and swede flavoured with lemon peel; another, Mignon, who runs an Indian catering company in Somerset, explains why vegetable jalfrezi is a good way to use up parsnips and carrots.

There is a hopeful, expectant feeling among the cooks as they finally pack up and prepare to return to their kitchens across the country, to spread the gospel of the veg box far and wide.

The Times - 28/1/10