Meet the member:
Balgove Larder

We set Balgove up in 2010, ‘we’ being Henry Cheape and me. Henry and I met at Newcastle University and shared a passion for good food and where it comes from. After several adventures and trips, we realised we could work well together in challenging circumstances.

Henry had a desire to diversify his family estate, which had an old farm steading that could suit a farm shop business. The more we looked into it, the more it made sense. And crucially the timing was right.

I worked in the kitchens at Bibendum restaurant in London after University and then went to Ballymaloe, a cooking school in Ireland. I was a chef for a couple of years after that, including a season in a remote fishing lodge on the Russian Yokanga River in the Arctic circle. I love cooking and working with the raw ingredients, as close to their source as possible.

This led me to a sales position at Colchester Oyster Fishery when I returned from Russia. The role involved selling live oysters, lobsters, crabs and other amazing shellfish, sourced from all around the UK coast, but primarily the North and West Coast of Scotland, (an area I have always loved), to top London restaurants and European wholesale markets. I was promoted to managing director after 2 years and was in at the deep end of learning how to run and grow a business.

My catering and back story had always had a strong lean towards provenance, seasonal and local. Everything kept coming back to this being absolutely fundamental when it comes to delicious sustainable food.

Russia taught me to be resourceful and resilience and Colchester was basically a business degree often learning the hard way, but always learning. They certainly both helped to realise the opportunity when we started looking into Balgove.
We also took a lot of inspiration from other operators in the farm retail sector. We wanted Balgove to be real, to be a proper farm shop, not just another shop on a farm and there is a big difference between the two.

Henry’s farm had always had a mix of arable and traditional breed livestock, and it was the livestock that we really focussed on, wanting to showcase the benefits of free range (at that time), home reared meat in our butchery. We quickly found lots of fantastic growers and producers, both fledgling and multi-generational family businesses that formed much of our supply chain. ‘Convenience’ would be key to achieving the footfall that we were aiming for. This meant having a broad enough offering to entice customers to us instead of the supermarkets.

There are countless ‘elements’ that need to align for a local product to make it to our shelves – we have worked closely with a lot of producers and growers to develop items and lines for Balgove. That’s before you consider collection/delivery etc. Consistency is also king – it’s a real challenge to produce something delicious, let alone make it identical every single time! But that’s where local does win out as we know and we have very good relationships with all our suppliers – without them we would have nothing!

Training. We were like two young bulls racing for the finish line in the days before we opened, and that was just the beginning. We opened as quickly as possible and really should have put more time into the team and training. However, we still have a number of the team members we started with.

We only close for 3 days a year so training is very much ‘on the job’. We now have a fantastic team who do an incredible job, but it’s a very labour-intensive business and we need to keep skills development and team morale at the forefront. The average age of a butcher in Scotland is 60 and we must work hard to engage good young team members to keep up with our growth.

Amazingly our original business plan still holds true to how we operate now, and we have grown quickly, trying to keep up with demand or even occasionally get ahead of it. But crucially we have grown at a sustainable pace.

We have grown to nearly 7 times the size in terms of sales since year one, which has involved 4 phases of building work. We have focussed on areas of the business that have grown quickly and tried to remove bottle necks, all the while keeping a very close eye on quality and provenance. We have worked on our own farm production and geared up the farm where possible to supply directly to Balgove, including establishing a market garden enterprise and growing the head count on the livestock farming. We introduced seasonal Night Markets, which continue to show good growth and foot fall and sales continue to grow.

The Farm has also undergone some really exciting changes in recent years, converting to regenerative farming, which will happen to be organic once certified. This includes mob grazing the livestock and really focusing on soil health and no chemical inputs.

I love time on the tills and the shop floor, which was common place to begin with, but sadly there’s ever increasing admin and office work to ensure the show goes on.
Our commitment to trading at our best every single day often means I’m a plumber, light bulb changer and general problem solver, but thankfully much of this can now be delegated. We have had to adapt and change almost every year as we introduce new elements to the business. This has only been possible due to the dynamism of the key team who help deliver the vision.

We’ve never advertised, instead choosing to keep ploughing any spare resource into trying to make the business as good as it possibly can be. Social media has changed this and it always blows my mind how far and effective it reaches.

We had a challenging time over the pandemic and following inflation, but hope to continue to grow our offering at Balgove. The Fife food and drink scene is generally doing such a great job and we regularly find new innovative products and produce coming forward – it’s a vital sector that has a lot of headroom to continue to grow into.

We have a number of plans, but only really like talking about them when we have a realistic timetable. For now, we’re looking to host more events on site and up the ante on educating more on what we do behind the scenes.