Phil Haughton, The Better Food Company, Bristol

The Better Food Company originated as a home delivery service in 1984. Since then it has grown to encompass a box scheme, an organic supermarket, a garden shop, and a wholesale vegetable operation, supplied by the Victorian walled gardens at Wrington, North Somerset that Phil took over in 2000. He also runs two cafés (one in Bristol and one in Wrington) and a shop selling clothing, books, household paints and other eco-friendly lines. The company now employs 30 staff. The Better Food company has won many awards including Soil Association Organic Food Awards for Best Box Scheme (1998) and Best local food initiative (2005).

• Can you give a short history of how you got to where you are now, including why and when you ‘went organic’?
  I’ve been organic since the age of 14. My mum gave me a subscription to the Soil Association back in 1972. Went to do smallholding in Scotland - John Seymour style. I read Newman Turner and Soil Association-type old farming books and never looked back. I was manager of the city farm in Bristol from 1981-84, teaching kids and others about food production. I set up a home delivery service and then shops between 1985-89. Had a break as house-husband and dadand in 1991, I set up the box scheme. I started supplying wholesale to shops, restaurants and box schemes at the same time. I took on big new premises and also Victorian walled gardens in 2000 and then launched the organic supermarket, and stopped home delivery apart from the veg boxes. I took over garden café 2003, and recently doubled the floor space of Bristol offices to incorporate a café and eco-centre.

• Can you describe a typical day in your life?
  Hectic and people driven. I start with sanity by walking the dogs at 6.30am. After that I go to the gardens, get the day’s produce picked, and check in with café staff. I then set the day’s horticultural tasks before going to the Bristol office. I say hello to as many people as possible, and work through my stuff and meetings. Leave for home between 5 and 7pm and usually cook food and then work for an hour or so in my home office. Stop by 9pm, watch TV and news, read and sleep.

• Who are your customers and where are they?
  65 per cent of our Bristol customers are within walking or cycling distance of the shop, the rest travel from all over Bristol and much further because we have the biggest range of organic foods in the South West. The mix of customers is huge. We took this site on so we could offer less affluent folk good access to organic food, but we also depend on bigger spenders from other areas. The gardens and café get their customers from all over the region. It’s a horticultural heritage site really, so people come for all sorts of reasons: the beauty, the organic, the food.

• Organic principles – why do they matter?
  They are the foundation of healthy life for all humans, animals and soil. Without sustainable agriculture we are stuffed. The Soil Association need to keep as close to this notion as possible, and keep the barking compromisers away from the door.

• What does the Soil Association mean to you?
  They are the backdrop to my organic life. Always there fighting the cause, searching for answers and debating solutions and compromises. They mean too much paper work in certification, but security of standards and trust in products both home and overseas.

• What is your greatest achievement?
  Having the home and family I always wanted. I lived in a village in North Yorkshire as a kid. Living in a beautiful village in Chew Valley only happened because Geraldine and I took on another project, the house, just when I had just started the new supermarket and the gardens. It was a wreck and total madness, but one of the last affordable places under the hammer. Charlie, my boy, is growing up in a great place very like the one I grew up in. Geraldine and I work too hard and come home to a huge garden. It’s mad but the garden gives us time to catch up with each other while we work in it.

• How do you plan to progress in the future? What is your vision?
  Three days on the land and at the garden café, two days in Bristol office. I’m getting there slowly. In five years I would like to have another two shops. Then I’d like to move on to do other things such as help make Bristol great, do my bit for the Soil Association and visit some farms around the world. Food production and processing fascinates me and yet I know so little about it.

• If you were starting all over again, what would you do differently?
  I guess I would find some money and then do it, rather than do it and hope the money will happen. I would take time to design a whole operation with sustainability in all aspects at its heart before starting. It’s so difficult to get it done in retrospect.

• What is the most important lesson life has taught you?
  Remember you have a choice. Whatever situation you’re in, whatever you feel, there is a way of saying ‘it’s fine’ and feeling that.

• Who or what’s your biggest inspiration?
  Gosh! Nature I guess. It constantly amazes me. If only we could be less human and more like the rest of the natural world. I love the art people produce in so many forms.

• What is the key to your success?
  What is success? Drive, energy, and tenacity. Maybe also my madness.

• What do you love most about what you do?
  I love the people most. The feeling I get about offering something people want, be it staff working for an ethical company, customers getting what they want and need or my family who love me despite my over-indulgence in work.

• What keeps you awake at night?
  Not a lot. Stress and agitation when I'm in the middle of a project.

• What single thing would most improve your life?
  Relaxation, letting go of control and opening my eyes to wider choices about what I do with my time.

• What do you find most frustrating about what you do?
  Me! I get in my way too often. I stop myself being effective and I stop myself having fun.

• Any unusual hobbies?
  Dancing. I love to dance, alone at home, in crowds at a party. Wherever. I have an ambition to fly, hang glide or the like. Not done it yet. I do landscaping in the field that is now our garden. I cycle too little. I did a Soil Association-sponsored ride, Bilbao to Barcelona. Loved it so much.

• How can the organic market be improved?
  Take out all big business. Connections are the key to the sustainability of a whole life. We need a far more radical marketplace. It is very ‘me me’ orientated. Its vitality as a market is now in question. Roots: give more people the chance to feel roots and then you have vitality. We need people to change their life styles more radically than just buying organic, so much of which is over-processed, over-packaged, over-travelled and has lost 90 per cent of its soul on the way. The new food is surely soul food and you get that from close to home.

• What’s the main benefit of being organic for you?
  Soul and vitality.

• What other organic ventures do you admire and why?
  The small ones who have no desire to be otherwise. The people who love with a passion the venture they started. The names that spring to mind are suppliers for our shop like Adey’s Farm (Caroline and Tim Wilson), Manor Farm (Pam and Will Best) and Court Farm (John Twine - sadly no longer making wonderful yoghurt).

• Supermarkets – good or bad?
  Terrible beyond what most people realise. They have played a huge part in taking away our choice and control of food, leaving a path of devastation in food production and a nation totally out of touch with its agriculture.

• What is the biggest threat to what you do?
  There are no real threats in comparison with the threat for us all of global catastrophe, which we can all do a lot to avert if we choose.

• What’s the best thing about organic farms?
  Diversity and heart.

• What’s the best thing about organic food?
  Vitality and soul at its best. Little more than other food at its worst.

• What is your favourite meal?
  A really good roast dinner. But I love so many foods and no meal is ever the same.

• If I was Prime Minister I would…
  Make our country a better place by putting people and planet before everything else, in all cases, even if the economy collapsed because of it. The only way to a better world may be painful in some ways.

• The world would be a better place if…
  The human condition was not addicted to wealth and possession.

• I’d like to be remembered for…
  Being able to let go of all the passion and just relax with my family at the heart of my life.

• When were you happiest?
  Maybe when I was a little boy. Maybe when I reached 40 for a while. I am actually happiest when I stop being manic about saving the planet and just relax.

• What is your greatest fear?
  The day growing food in England becomes near impossible due to the gulf stream stopping!

• What is your favourite word?
  I have no idea. How about “relatively”. No idea why, it just came out.

• What would be your ‘Desert Island’ luxury?
  A good woman!

• Is the customer always right?
  Not on your life! Honour them and be humble, do all you can to give them a good service but don’t be bullied.

For more information about The Better Food Company
» visit www.betterfood.co.uk