Our Ethos

Overview 

We are a collective of farmers and food-makers in South Wales, passionate about delivering high quality and regenerative local produce. We have come up with an efficient way to get local and high-welfare food to the community without large overheads, shop rents and a fleet of vans. By delivering to collection points in your community, we can make sure you have the freshest local produce straight from Farm to Fork.
The concept is simple. Shop or subscribe here on our website and get your FarmCo Box full of fresh and tasty produce delivered to a pickup point near where you live or delivered to your door.

Why collection Points? 

 By partnering with established businesses such as eateries, cafes and community centres we are able to create a unique business model where we can deliver and distribute your order into your town or village at a specific day and time window each week. We believe this is a revolutionary step for the food industry, so many other industries have utilised technologies to improve existing services and this is our way of moving the food industry forward, skipping the supermarket and getting local produce back into local communities.

As of Sept 2021, we are now have a select amount of delivery slots for those who cant make the collections.

Getting Social

We set up our first hub two years ago as a Food Assembly, within weeks something quite special happened. People would come to the collection to pick up their produce and stay, chat about where the produce came from and about how it was made, customers would swap recipes, cooking tips and stay for a coffee, a pint. There was a demand for local produce, but people also really wanted that connection to food, a connection much lost in the cold sterile aisles of supermarkets. This connection to our food would have been the life blood of Produce Markets around the country many years ago. We thrive off this connection and occasionally we like to go a step further, we have organised and run mini food festivals, film nights and supper clubs with our venue partners. This joint exposure is great way for us to spread our message and offers our partner venues an extra opportunity to spread theirs.
Come and experience it for yourself and if you are a venue in South Wales with similar values, who would like to partner with FarmCo, please drop us an email.

Competing with convenience, competing with quality

 It takes minutes to shop online and its even quicker to collect. Our model enables us to shorten food chains and get the freshest produce straight into your box. No mass transportation, storage, complicated logistics or airfreight. Once your orders are in the makers get making, growers get picking and preparing. The orders get delivered to our Tin Shed on North Gower. Within hours the boxes are packed and labelled and delivered to your collection points, ready for you to pick up.

  Our Food, Our Ethics

 We believe convenience shopping has driven the food industry into disrepair, ripped the heart out of communities and destroyed small scale agriculture businesses all over the country. It’s time to take it back. We are a value led business meaning we value food, how it is made, its social impacts and the effect on the environment. Our principles are simple, LOCAL and REGENERATIVE.
 
Transparency is at the forefront of this business and offering a ‘supermarkets’ worth of produce is difficult for a small team. We are lucky to have our Farmers and Food Makers onboard and a part of the FarmCo collective. They are more than just suppliers, we speak to them every day, they are the backbone of this business and supporting them is the reason we exist.
 
We support the Soil Association, The Slow Food Movement, Pasture for Life Association and that is where our ethics lie. Our fruit and veg is and will always be 100% Soil Association Organic. We have direct contact with our Farmer and Food Makers so when the produce is not Organic, we ensure a level of responsibility to protect food quality, animal well-being and the environment. We call this High Welfare, so basically our produce is either Organic or High Welfare.

So, is it always Local? 

In Short, No. Its incredibly difficult to balance a diverse range, especially when it comes to fruit and veg. The reality is in between Feb – July not a lot grows in the UK and even more depressingly, not many people are growing. Everything else is made and farmed locally. We have tried seasonal only veg on FarmCo but having only potatoes, swede and parsley on offer doesn’t really cut the mustard for the consumer in these months. We need to offer a good range to be in this business, so the origin is stated in the product details. When imported the veg is always soil association certified meaning the farms and farming methods are checked regularly and will always be shipped (no airfreight). The good news it from July to Feb there is an abundance of amazing produce in Wales and we get to taste it all.
 

Zero Food Waste

We work on a pre order basis, meaning you have to order approximately a day and a half before your collection. This gives the Farmers & Foodmakers a day to pick and pack your order. This ensures freshness and quality, but it also means zero food waste, absolutely nothing is left over. Everything that is sold is made and everything that is made is sold, all you have to do is eat it all. We use minimal packaging and will reuse and recycle any unwanted items. Our FarmCo Boxes can be reused up to 10 times and yes, we want them back!
 

Quick History

We started out in 2017 as Swansea Food Assembly. The main goal was to test the market and measure the demand for local produce and see how we could transform it into something bigger. Initially we thought that something bigger could be a Farm Shop but quickly we saw the demand in an area, dominated by Supermarkets, for something new (or old depending on how you look at it). People wanted good food, straight from Farm to Fork, people wanted to interact with their Farmer and Food Makers and ordering online for a localised audience worked, it allowed the business to expand organically and allowed us to focus our energies on food ethics and quality.
 
Fast forward a year, The Food Assembly ceased trading in the UK. This left us in a tricky position, no website and no name but we knew we needed to push on and interpret this as an opportunity to grow bigger and reach our end goal. We launched FarmCo seamlessly to The Food Assembly’s departure, and spent a few months trying to work out what FarmCo was. We were lucky to be able to utilise a similar platform and continue to trade working with the same producers to get local produce to the Swansea community. It’s been a year since we worked it all out, we have moved away considerably from ‘The Food Assembly Model’. We are an Online Farm Shop, a collective of farmers and food makers who care about local and regenerative food. We are based at The Tin Shed in North Gower and we have 4 collection points around Swansea. We want 20 collection points across South Wales by this time next year. We are FarmCo, we are the future of real food in South Wales.
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