Speaker.
Guy Watson
Riverford Organic Veg Box Scheme
Profile:
Guy was born and raised at Riverford Farm as one of five children, all five of whom are today running food businesses from the farm. After a short spell working as a marketing consultant in London and New York he returned to the farm to start Riverford Organic Vegetables in 1986. The business has grown from three acres and a wheel barrow, over 21 years, to a business employing 400 staff with sales of £30 million.A vegetable box scheme was started in 1993 as a means of escaping the grasp of the supermarkets and now delivers to 25,000 households a week and represents 95% of sales. Building on this success, but trying to keep the business at a personal and human scale, a further 20,000 deliveries a week are made through a number of locally based joint ventures with growers in Yorkshire, Hampshire and Peterborough.
Guy is an enthusiast for co-operation, collaboration and profit sharing in business. Growth is not everything; He has stated that Riverford will always be owned by the real stakeholders of he business (those who supply or work in it) and will never sell out to venture capitalists or the major brand holders of the food business.
What I'm talking about:
In search of a better way: 25 years of obstinacy
I will just get up and talk; I will go through a brief history of the business and then go on to why we do what we do the way we do it. I will be ready to answer your questions so get your thinking caps on and come up with some good ones for him.
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My Brainfood
Websites
- Riverford Vegetables
- The official Riverford Veg Box website
- Monbiot
- George Monbiot’s blogspot
- Magic Seaweed
- Surf reports, pictures, news - anything surf related is on here
- Kulika
- Kulika was established in 1981 in the UK as a grant-making charitable trust specialising in the provision of educational scholarships for East African students
Books
- Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered
- Author:
Description: A study of economics as if people mattered
ISBN: 0099225611 - The Age of Unreason: New Thinking For A New World
- Author:
Description: It’s about thinking the unlikely and doing the unreasonable. A look at alternative organisational structures and the benefits they could afford us
ISBN: 0099548313 - The Hungry Spirit: Beyond Capitalism - A Quest for Purpose in the Modern World
- Author:
Description: Beyond Capitalism a quest for purpose in the modern world
ISBN: 0091801680 - A Long Way Gone: The True Story of a Child Soldier
- Author:
Description: This is a first hand account of how wars are now fought: by children, on drugs, with AK-47’s by a child who has been to the brink and returned to tell his story
ISBN: 0007247095 - The Hospital by the River: A Story of Hope
- Author:
Description: This book is Catherin Hamlin’s life story, an Australian woman who going on a short work placement as a doctor in Africa found herself, 40 years later, still there changing the lives of women dealing with the horrible effects of obstructed labour
ISBN: 1854246739
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