At Abergavenny Food Festival, we’re passionate about growing the market-place for high-quality, delicious, craft food. Whether you’re a farmer, cheese-maker, brewer or chocolatier, the festival has always been the place to come to talk to your customers, trial new products, tell your story, and grow your business.
As the festival has grown, we have been thinking about how to best help our food producing community to thrive. In the face of great political and economic uncertainty, we understand that many small businesses are facing real challenges, and we feel that the festival is well placed to deliver a national campaign to encourage the public to spend more with local farmers and food producers.
We want to understand more about how the reach of the festival can be put to good use to help grow the market for the food you make year-round. We’ve teamed up with the Conservation Farming Trust, to host a conversation amongst our food businesses community in order to explore two questions:
- How do we grow the market, and increase consumer spend with independent food businesses across Wales?
- What support and resources can we provide to help new entrants setting up food & farming enterprises?
In the first instance we want to hear from Welsh food businesses, with a view to expanding the project further in the future.
Over the next 6-weeks, we will be hosting a conversation by-way of a closed Facebook group, and any member of our food business community can participate. Each week we will be posting a specific topic of conversation and asking some questions to get you thinking about how we could all team up together to significantly grow the market for “Welsh food.”
We might be asking you about communications initiatives that have really inspired you, or what resources would have been most helpful to you when you started your businesses. We’ll be asking how people can get started with very little capital, or how to access land, equipment or production spaces.
At the end of the 6-weeks, we hope to have gathered valuable information about how a project like this could be useful to your business and have generated ideas on how we might all collaborate together to deliver significant public engagement campaigns on food in the future.
If you would be interested in being part of the conversation, we need your help in two ways:
- Got a minute? Then fill in the survey here. We’ve kept it short, with 10 quick questions. Your input is invaluable.
- Got 5 minutes? Join the Facebook group by clicking here and requesting to join. The Facebook group will host a different topic each week for the next 6 weeks. You can answer questions, add comments and share inspiring resources as often as you have time for.
At the end of the 6-weeks, we will be using the information gathered through this conversation to flesh out a wider project plan, which we hope to launch for you at Food Festival 2019