HISBE: a rebel supermarket on a mission

Ruth Anslow from HISBE talks about the challenges of managing a small food business during the coronavirus pandemic and the impact you can have when you shop from small, local businesses.

HISBE is a rebel supermarket on a mission to transform the food industry.

HISBE Food exists to challenge the unsustainable and exploitative food industry. We do things very differently to the average supermarket and we’re out to prove that a sustainable future for food and farming is possible, if you reinvent the way supermarkets do business. Food retail can be part of the solution, it just needs to evolve…

We’re a social enterprise with a different type of business model: when you spend £1 at our supermarket, we pass 68 pence back to the suppliers. There are no big pay-outs for directors or shareholders, so what’s left pays our staff, bills and debtors. 

Our whole ethos is about making good food that’s sustainably sourced and responsibly traded as accessible and affordable as we can. We think through the issues so our shoppers don’t have to, we find the most sustainable solutions we can, and we put all the good stuff under one roof, to make it as accessible as possible.

Facing the challenges of Covid.

During a health pandemic, access to good food is even more important than ever! Our biggest challenge over the last 20 months was simply to keep our shop in Brighton open… we had a responsibility to keep good food flowing, keep our customers served, our staff in their jobs and protect the income of our many small suppliers.

Our supermarket relies on hundreds of hardworking people – and I don’t just mean our own store team, I mean the people who make the food and the people who shift it, from the farmers, producers and suppliers to the warehouse and distribution guys and the truck drivers. Suddenly, like us, these people were “key workers”, they were all under a lot of pressure and all our livelihoods were at stake.

We also rely on a steady stream of customers who value what we do and want to vote for sustainable food and farming with their patronage and their wallets! But last year tens of thousands of people in Brighton & Hove were stuck in their homes and started to get all their grocery shopping in one go, online, from one of the big supermarkets. So, as for countless other high-street businesses, the drop in customer numbers had a big impact on our shop.

Protecting our customers, our staff, and our business.

In the years before the Covid-19 outbreak, the HISBE leadership team had been working on expansion and we had just taken a lease on a new shop in Worthing (signed just days before, on 28th February). But in March we had to put that aside and focus on the safety of our Brighton store and the survival of our social enterprise.

We implemented new risk assessments, social distancing, and cleaning protocols to protect our staff and customers. Then we put a breakeven model in place and reduced the trading day accordingly, to react to the drop in customer numbers. We ran one shift and, at first, we were only open from midday to 6pm, which made the extra protocols manageable and the store job as straightforward as possible for the staff. We furloughed six of our staff and, for a time, our leadership team, so that we could afford to safeguard everybody’s jobs.

We’re very proud of our store team – they really pulled together and did a great job of managing the social distancing, extra cleaning and customer queues at the door. Not only did we achieve a safe environment, but they were able to maintain a friendly and relaxed vibe, which is so important to people. The world may have been going nuts, but our shop was to be a little oasis of calm in the craziness!

And slowly everyone became accustomed to our Covid measures. It became normal to follow daily hygiene and safety protocols around mask-wearing, handwashing, sanitising surfaces, and safety screens. Now, in November 2021, we are very grateful that we made it through this difficult time, returned to normal trading hours and successfully brought all the staff out of furlough. And we’re grateful to every single customer who was able to support our shop, through all the uncertainty, the restrictions, and the lockdowns.

During this period, many of our suppliers faced huge challenges with staffing, production, and distribution. And our smallest suppliers are kitchen table businesses run by one or two people. But we have been absolutely blown away by the resilience of people and how well our hundreds of suppliers kept going, doing what they do, even under these strenuous conditions. It makes you appreciate more than ever that the people who make and move our food. It’s their passion, commitment and resilience that makes the UK “good food” supply chain work and we depend on them more than ever, in the face of Covid, future pandemics and, of course, Brexit.

Opening a store in the middle of a pandemic.

Good things can come out of struggle – and our good thing was our long-anticipated, brand-new second store, on Portland Road in Worthing. In September the leadership team made the decision to go ahead with the investment in the second store, despite the uncertainty over what would happen to high street businesses, and we launched it in January 2021. 

It may have been eight months later than planned, it may have ended up opening on a rainy day in the middle of another lockdown, but it was open – and hundreds of locals came out to support us. The store was a dream five years in the making and it was such a glorious, positive day and a testament to what we could achieve, even under immense pressure.

Worthing is a great town, with both a wonderful old history and a buzzing new vibe. There’s a thriving independent business scene there, a dynamic council committed to local economic stimulation and a lot of great work going on in sustainability – and we’re so happy to be part of it all. 

Appealing for people to go ‘Back to Better’.

It’s still hard out here and many thousands of independent high street businesses continue to feel the impact of Covid… but people are drifting back to our shops, emerging from these life-changing months into a time of transition. Because we all find ourselves at a crossroads, where we can choose to go back to normal, or we can choose to go back to better. A sustainable future for British food and farming is possible – we just have to choose it. 

So, we encourage everyone to choose what they want to see more of in this world. We ask you to support the many small food brands and shops genuinely creating solutions to our unsustainable, carbon-guzzling, over-industrialised, wasteful and polluting food industry. We ask you to make small habit changes and swaps in what you buy. We ask you to buy less stuff from the big supermarkets and more stuff from HISBE and shops like ours.  

When you shop at HISBE you’re choosing real food and real farms, that are better for you and better for the planet. You’re choosing values-led brands, local suppliers, UK-grown seasonal produce, high animal welfare, sustainable fish, plastic-free shopping, pesticide-free and organic standards. You’re voting for working with (not against) nature, zero to landfill, ditching packaging, plastic-free shopping and zero food waste. You’re supporting people with proper employment contracts, fair pay for staff and suppliers, ethical trading – and you’re keeping your money in the local economy. 

Everyone can help shape the future of food, it’s not about doing everything perfectly, it’s about taking small actions, every time you buy your groceries, for a better future. To quote the inimitable Anita Roddick, “Next time you go shopping, demand more change.”