DELI OF THE MONTH While some retailers pay lip service to the local food approach that is gaining traction among the public, Chris Wildman is an evangelist of the movement. If a product hasn’t got provenance or a story, you simply won’t find it in Town End Farm Shop, where, when it comes to food... Interview by Tom Dale
The only way is Yorkshire THE LAST FEW miles as FFD approaches Town End Farm Shop are about as quiet and rural as they come. Tight, dry-stonewall-lined roads divide apparently endless agricultural fields. Given its location in the sparsely populated area between Skipton and Settle at the foot of the Yorkshire Dales, you might think that the business would struggle for custom, but the roaring trade this small, locally focused farm shop and café has done over the past two years says otherwise. “It’s gone absolutely mental,” says managing director Chris Wildman while packing sausages made from pigs reared on the family farm. “When people were allowed back out from the lockdowns it was just crazy.”
VITAL STATISTICS
Location: Airton, Skipton BD23 4BE Turnover: £750k Staff members: 25 (10 full time eq.) Average spend: £16
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January-February 2022 | Vol.23 Issue 1
It’s mostly tourists, he says, but perhaps it is the nation’s new-found appetite for supporting independents and shopping local – and ‘staycationing’ – that has fuelled the growth. Wildman, a self-confessed “local food evangelist”, is a zealous advocate of the localfirst approach that many independent fine food retailers follow, but for this retailer, it is in his blood. “The family has been in the food production business forever, I’m a fifthgeneration butcher,” he says. “I’ve no qualifications, I was just born a butcher’s son of a butcher’s son, of a butcher’s son, so I can’t help it.” The family’s shop – killed off, says Wildman, by the rise of the supermarket
in the ’90s – lay ten miles away, and was supplied by its own abattoir. “It was a fantastic example of field to table with no miles, with no stress on the animals,” he says. And he has carried this approach with him into Town End. The family still farms in the area, but eight years ago, after being approached by the business’s former owners, Wildman took over the farm shop in the small village of Airton in response to dwindling farmers’ market and online sales in the family’s butchery business. “We went from web and market sales to bricks and mortar,” he says. “I’m a born-andbred shopkeeper, so it was a natural change for me.” Since then, he has set about putting his
