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 nd 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 elds.

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.”

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 local rst approach that many independent ne 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 hgeneration butcher,” he says. “I’ve no quali cations, 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 o , 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 eld 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, a er 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

VITAL STATISTICS

Location: Airton, Skipton BD23 4BE Turnover: £750k Staff members: 25 (10 full time eq.) Average spend: £16

own, Yorkshire stamp on the business.

“The customer pro le has changed massively since we took over. It was very much a tea-and-a-wee destination before,” he says.

Because of the farm shop’s picturesque location – it boasts unspoiled views to Malham Cove and the Dales – more than two thirds of its trade would come for a cream tea, and pick up some cake and jam. “That’s great, but it’s not very exciting for me,” says Wildman.

Revamped menu items like his ‘Yorkshire quesadilla’ – a wrap lled with Yorkshire mozzarella, spinach, and Yorkshire chorizo – were added to the menu. “Not great for grannies,” he says, “but we sold tonnes.”

Now, the customer base is still made up largely of tourists and passing trade. The pandemic has increased the nation’s appetite for staycations and getting out in local areas, and Wildman attributes this to the shop’s growth over the past two years. When he speaks to FFD in January, the shop is about twice as busy as it would have been in the new year pre-pandemic.

The owner also revamped the shop’s o er, ditching big brands and palm oil, where possible, and focusing the range as locally as possible.

As Wildman shows FFD around his modest retail space, he proudly announces the short distance that many of the lines have travelled to get here. His recall is impressive, reeling o names, personal family connections and what makes each product unique, sustainable, or just ‘Yorkshire’. As if arranged, mid-tour, cheesemaker Robert Essler strides in with the shop’s latest half wheel of East Barn Brie in hand. “One mile!” Wildman shouts. Needless to say, he has a story of the cheese’s creation, which – in Town End’s spirit of local collaboration – involves the man himself.

“I always say it’s got to have provenance or a story, and really I’d like it to have both,” he says. And while some farm shops may pay lip service to this notion, Wildman is pious in his adherence. Out-of-season fruit and veg is sacrilege and palm oil, profane.

He lls the butcher’s counter with meat from the family farms where possible, buys very locally; ideally from Yorkshire, he says.

There is the odd exception, though. COVID forced the retailer to expand his usual range. Extra pasta came from The Yorkshire Pasta Co. – naturally – and environmentally friendly toilet paper from wholesaler Suma – Yorkshire-based, of course.

Town End sells only artisan or farmhouse cheese with one exemption. Kick Ass Strong Cheddar is a “more processed” product made near Preston, Lancashire, by Tim Proctor, an old school friend of Wildman’s and the son of the man who supplied cheese to Wildman senior’s butcher’s shop, “but it gets in because of the story.”

Another pandemic-induced addition is the shop’s Post O ce counter, absorbed when the village’s closed at the start of the crisis. “It’s a pain in the arse, but it feels like a duty to the area.”

And the appeal of Wildman’s o er – for both locals and the burgeoning tourist trade – is palpable. A continuous stream of custom snakes its way around the shop’s natural one-way system, some taking in the full gamut of regional produce, tightly but carefully packed onto Town End’s wooden shelving, others shipping a parcel and picking up a pint of milk.

Wildman dashes between seating

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customers in the café – his wife exclaiming that teacups are running dangerously low (a sign of good trade, not poor dishwashing) – and jumping on the second till. In spare moments he returns to the back room to continue packing sausages.

It’s all action at Town End, and – with a Champion of Champions Product at the British Charcuterie Live Awards just under his belt – any downtime Wildman gets is spent keeping production going on his other venture, Wildman Charcuterie.

Based at the farm shop, with a second site for curing, Wildman, along with his brother, produces a range of Continentalinspired charcuterie with a Yorkshire twist. The range sold particularly well in the runup to Christmas, both in-store and online.

“This is just a continuation of what my family has been doing for generations,” he says.

The operation even makes use of some of the equipment that had been in the family butcher’s shop: meat slicers, presses and sausage trays that Wildman was using as a boy when helping out.

This family legacy is something important to the retailer-charcutier; he continues to rear animals on the rugged fells and supply the community with good, local produce, only with his own modern spin.

It was while he was working for the family business, selling meat at farmer’s markets that he started relationships with many of the small producers that today he calls suppliers.

“We’ve got such a rich culture of food right here. It’s very close to my heart, so I know everything about that product, everything about these jams, I know the people, I’ve been to the production site,” says Wildman.

For the retailer, these personal relationships are paramount. It means he has the story of each product straight from the source, but, more importantly, that he can have discussions around palm oil, for example, and work with the producers to make a truly regional product.

“It makes the books quite di cult to maintain, but I’ve developed a pretty sophisticated IT system to deal with that,” he says.

He does use wholesalers to top up his range – The Cress Co, Springvale, Suma – but his strict criteria still apply when picking lines from a catalogue. “I like Cress because they’ve got a northern and Scottish focus, so I can still get those small, artisan producers with good provenance.”

Looking to the year ahead, Wildman has plans to grow the e-commerce side of his business. It is a popular addition to the shop’s o er at Christmas but is quiet for the remainder of the year. The owner hopes to use the growing success of Wildman Charcuterie to drive tra c and maintain the focus on provenance.

Included in each order is a card relaying some of the stories he is so passionate about to the online consumer.

So, it seems, you can take the produce out of Yorkshire, but you can’t take Yorkshire out of the produce.

townendfarmshop.co.uk

I always say it’s got to have provenance or a story, and really I’d like it to have both