Wow what a year 2020 has been so far!
Since the end of March we have gone through the single biggest upscale in our activities we’ve ever experienced. In a week, we found we’d doubled our veg box scheme from 300 per week to 600 per week. We had to close to new customers just to ensure that it was actually possible to fulfill this many orders; we stopped using volunteers to help us pack and employed everyone as they put their health at risk to continue to deliver fruit and veg across the city; we erected a marquee outside the building just so we had enough space to put all the produce being delivered and to pack it. And now after a couple of months of fine tuning, installing a lift in the building, taking out a loan to pay for the lift, cancelling the 10 year anniversary of The Folk Forest (our biggest event of the year) and pausing our events programme at Regather until 2021, we’ve realised we need to make some changes.
If Regather is going to weather this storm, we have to increase our prices to cover more of our costs and we also want to improve our offer to our customers as we’ve seen increasing costs of fruit particularly that have resulted in smaller portions sizes. We are therefore increasing the prices of all of our fruit and veg boxes, as well as the delivery charges. We don’t do this lightly, and we’ve been careful to make sure that we still remain competitive and as accessible as we can.
From next week, 29th June, we will be making the following changes to our prices:
| Product | Old Price | New Price |
| Veg Small | £6.00 | £6.75 |
| Veg Medium | £8.25 | £9.50 |
| Veg Large | £11.50 | £13.25 |
| Veg No Pot Small | £7.00 | £7.75 |
| Veg No Pot Medium | £9.25 | £10.50 |
| Veg No Pot Large | £12.50 | £14.25 |
| Plastic Free | £11.50 | £13.00 |
| UK Only | £11.50 | £13.00 |
| XS Fruit | £3.00 | £4.50 |
| Small Fruit | £5.00 | £6.50 |
| Medium Fruit | £6.75 | £8.60 |
| Large Fruit | £8.50 | £10.50 |
| Extra Large Fruit | £10.50 | £12.75 |
We will also be increasing our delivery charges to £2.50 for up to 3 miles, and £3 for above 3 miles. We now have two vans on the road and a trike delivering 4 days a week. Our old Regather van is very much on its last legs (the old girl has done us well) and we need to start saving for a new one to replace her.
For our fruit boxes, we’ve been seeing increases in cost for a while now and in order to provide good fruit portions from the UK and Europe we have to increase our fruit budget. We want to give you the stars of local and seasonal fruit that we’ve often been priced out of offering.
In other big news, we will be opening a second collection day to provide more flexibility in collection offers. From next week we will be offering collection on Thursdays 3pm to 7pm at Regather. We want to thank our dedicated staff that have worked hard to increase our capacity to open up to more customers and offer a safe shopping experience for those wanting to access fruit and veg.
We cannot thank you enough for all the support we have received during this challenging period and also to those of our customers who have challenged us and inspired us to do better. Summer is very much on its way now and we are super excited about the seasonal bounty coming our way.
By supporting Regather, you are helping not just us and our newly developing Market Garden growing site in the Moss Valley, but also 4 other Sheffield based growing sites and their growers, loads of small and independent makers across Sheffield like Forge Bakery, Our Cow Molly and Heeley City Farm, plus many other Organic farms across the UK and Europe.
To all our new customers who joined us during these uncertain times and to all our long-standing ones, thank you and speak soon.
Veg box Team: The oldies (Fran, Clem, Rachel B, Sergiu, Becky, Alberto and Lisa) and the newbies (Eimear, Kes, Melvyn, Tom, Rich, Ruby, Rachel E and Duncan)
