Recipe for Greatness
Recipe for Greatness
Food with Integrity: Charles Redfern's Organic Journey
Charles Redfern shares his organic food journey from founding Real Foods, Organico, and Fish4ever, revealing how his French roots inspired a mission focused on reviving and expanding organic products with sustainability at the core.
• Accidentally entering finance before realising his passion for food entrepreneurship
• Starting with French cordial, facing distribution challenges and learning on the job
• Expanding into organic juices and becoming an early pioneer in the health food sector
• Developing Fish Forever brand focused on sustainability before it became mainstream
• Creating a comprehensive sustainability framework beyond just fish stocks to include social impact
• Building a unique 38-point "who, what, where, how" system for evaluating ethical sourcing
• Navigating economic disruptions through adaptability rather than rigid planning
• Establishing European presence as Brexit changed UK-EU trade relationships
• Highlighting the contrast between UK and European organic markets
• Challenging superficial sustainability claims in modern food marketing
3, 2, 1, 0, and liftoff Liftoff. Hello and welcome to the Recipe for Greatness podcast. I'm your host, jake Greenwood, and in this podcast we interview the founders behind some of the best food and drink companies to tease out the knowledge and skills that they've used to grow their business. Today, our guest is Charles Redfern, a leader in the organic food sector and the founder of Real Foods, bio, organico and Fish Forever. Charles has been at the forefront of the organic movement for over three decades. His dedication stems from his French roots and early exposure to the richness of simple, natural food. Charles leads a team committed to reviving and expanding the reach of organic products, focusing on integrity, sustainability and community. Charles, welcome to the podcast.
Jay Greenwood:Hi, thank you for having me Nice to meet you, so I wanted to jump in and talk about the turning point in your career where you left finance and decided to venture into the food industry. So I'm curious what insights or experiences convinced you to take that step and decide it was time for a change so I think I walked into finance accidentally.
Charles Redfern:Does that make sense? So I I've been away, not on a big travel, but in the way that people travel nowadays. But I traveled a little bit. I wasn't quite. I wanted to go into film actually, but I guess I didn't really want to because I didn't try it hard enough. Uh came back.
Charles Redfern:I had a chinese friend who told me a japanese bank was looking for non-oxbridge graduates. This is the true story. Uh went for an interview, was given a job, and I think they were just tired of oxbridge graduates. And for I was at lse, which is quite a good reference, it's quite a good university. But I didn't know, I was just looking for a job and it was interesting.
Charles Redfern:It was an interesting time in banking. The Japanese were becoming kind of very global. They had a huge financial surplus, so they'd been suddenly thrown into this global capital and I think markets were opening up and uh, uh. But after a while I realized that I that walking into a job that you don't want to do wasn't brilliant and it's really hard for everybody. You know, in that situation you know lots of people don't quite know what they want to do and they just need, they need to get a job.
Charles Redfern:Uh, and I'd always wanted to do my own business and I think I'd always liked food and, um, looking at back at it now, it was a time where, you know, britain wasn't that international actually, and through maybe traveling and, uh, just my friend groups and things like that, I've always had a real interest in food and it's pumping myself up a bit. But there's things that I've picked up in Spain that 15 years later somewhere else that I've liked, and then 15 years later they become almost meme-level liking. Were I to have done those products at that time, it would have been far too early and it wouldn't have worked. Things need to lift at the same time, but I'd always liked food. And then there was this French product, which is basically a cordial right, and in England you had squashes. It's pretty similar now, but there isn't. So you had all these squashes and I thought, wow, there's all these flavors and I used to have them when I was a kid.
Charles Redfern:In France, a grenadine mint aniseed literally every flavor in the world that you could mix in with water. I thought nobody does that. I'm going to go and do it and I'll ring up tesco's and sainsbury's and they'll say, great, uh, and I'll start a business. So I was totally naive, totally unprepared, I had no experience. I just wanted to get out of uh working for other people and, uh, that's the route. So I learned. I learned on the job effectively, uh, uh, there was a retailer called odd bins that was probably before your time, I don't know if it's a wine shop and they wanted my grenadine and then harvey nichols wanted my grenadine. It might have been better had they not, because then I would would have left and uh, not fought for so long, for so hard, as it were I wanted to dig in actually to that first product.
Jay Greenwood:It was the thing of grenadine cordial, I think it was. Yeah, I'm curious, what was the most valuable lessons you took from sort of you sort of mentioned launching that product and the market and sort of the consumer responses, because I think after you went to go through something else, so what did like launching that product teach you about?
Charles Redfern:I picked literally every and I think most people would would start a little bit cleverer than I did, because I was in the wrong place. I didn't, I had. I started with those uh storage. Um, you know where you put your personal storage and I remember my pallets being down the corridor, left, right, left. You know it wasn't very clever distribution ways. Uh, I didn't know how distribution worked. I didn't really have, you know, I didn't know how anything worked and it just came.
Charles Redfern:You're almost asking me to go back, but it I was out of my depth completely and I think the lucky bit was that two or three people actually picked it up. And the really lucky bit and this is where I would ground, where my education about the origins of food was that I went to a distributor in the health food sector called Marigold and they said, oh yeah, we'll take it. And it started selling and that worked slightly better than harvey nichols did. It worked better than um, the odd bins was good, but it wasn't working in a big way. And then I started selling to all the other health food distributors and you know, but I think I then realized that I needed a third party fulfillment warehouse partner.
Charles Redfern:Uh, found one. They've gone. You know I've changed around a lot. At the time I think I was changing quite a bit because things were going wrong and you just hit problems and solve them. Is is maybe the one big lesson that I've learned through time. Uh, it's better to to start more prepared than I am, and I think most people who start now would start more prepared.
Jay Greenwood:And I want to now move on to your first encounter with Whole Food Organic Movement. What elements made it seem like a better opportunity than sort of the grenadine cordial product that you were doing? Were there any sort of signals or noises that you thought that was a decision to pivot?
Charles Redfern:Right. So what happened is actually that grenadine cordial product became a range.
Charles Redfern:So there was peach, there was strawberry, there was other products in there and, um, I guess the other. One of the first lessons that I've learned time and time again is when you do other people's products, it's not the same as doing your own product and with the amount of marketing and expenditure and support you've got to give it it's. I started as an agent but I I did ask for exclusivity. From the beginning. I was given exclusivity because people probably thought there's no harm in giving this, this youngster, uh, exclusive. We we've got nothing going on in in england. Who knows. It might work, but the trouble when you don't control it is that when someone else controls it, you know when it's their brand. They're doing the packaging in their way. They might redraw products that you're selling. Quite well, they might change the recipes. You're not really directing it and with the amount of work you've got to put behind pushing something, that would have been one of my prime lessons, but that wasn't the question.
Jay Greenwood:The question was the question was what sort of um, the sort of what signals that you had from the organic movement, where you suddenly thought, right, let's make, because I could be wrong, but I get the sense from you that the grinding product was kind of working for you.
Charles Redfern:It was working well enough, yeah, no, what really happened then is I thought I need new products and I became a kind of um drinks company so I started uh, I then did a range of spanish juices that worked really well. I was the first one to do um peach juice in england so I was almost it predated Innocent, I was almost doing. They weren't sold like smoothies but they were very thick juices and we had pear and pineapple but peach was the big salad. People were buying containers of that at one point so that became more of my volume and I think and I've read someone he's the Artisan Somebody Club, he's a vague acquaintance of mine writing about how people don't think of the unit sales they need to do and really the juices is what made it just about viable in terms of getting to the volumes you need to sell, because you need to get quite a lot of sales volume. I do remember once asking a distributor and they were very proud that we had a product who were in 80% of their distribution points. And you sit there and think that's bad because I know how much I'm selling to you and if I'm in 80% of your distribution points I'm literally just making eight quid a month, you know, per distribution point. So I think the volume challenge, for starters, is a really difficult thing. You've got to sell quite a lot. So I had the cordials and I had juices and I think I had organic juices and this predates Planet Organic.
Charles Redfern:When Planet Organic came it was just after the BSE crisis. We're doing history of food now and they came and organic was brand new. There was organic products before, but not many. There was an organic movement before, but it was very mixed up and the only place that organic products really went were in health food shops. It was called the health food sector. Products really went were in health food shops. It was called the health food sector. And then planet organic started a came out of the health food sector and started a more of an organic focused uh way of position itself. And, uh, we were in the right place at the right time, because we've been at the health food sector for a long time and organic was everything that I believed food should be, in a way, so brought in. I like natural food, I like good food, I like food that, uh, you cook yourself.
Charles Redfern:Um, I'm used to going back to the story of one's food, knowing how it's made and that sort of thing, and organic was a kind of intellectual underpinning, bringing in the sustainability and the ethics side. And the health food sector had a few people, a few retailers, that were really pre-interested in sustainability questions long, long, long long before anybody else was. And I remember there was a particularly cantankerous guy that had a shop in Beaconsfield. He was called Cook's Delight. Anybody else was, and I remember there was a particularly cantankerous guy that um lived in b, had a shop in beaconsfield, he was called cook's delight and he would always pull something up and it was really and even if some of it was, uh, anti what you're doing, it was really a good learning lesson because he'd gone into the and I've picked that up in in my approach.
Charles Redfern:You know I go into the detail. I check things, check things, check things, check things. We're too flippant nowadays with sustainability. Everyone's got it on their website but they don't go into the depth of it. And you know simple things like plastic shopping bags. Most health food shops wouldn't have printed down plastic bags. I remember some shops where you'd come out with a sainsbury's bag because they were recycling naturally. Uh, you know other people's plastic bags. So there were certain things that didn't come into being a health food shop but similar efforts and organic was a similar ethic to her, to what the health food and whole food market wanted, and that's where they belonged so did then the sort of exploration into launching sort of um your own brands in the organic space.
Jay Greenwood:Was that stemming from the organic juices and it sort of spiraled from there, or was it right? Let's now refocus all efforts on this organic movement and create our own products in that sort of not focus on the other stuff?
Charles Redfern:Okay, so I started as an agent. I started picking up sole agencies, exclusive agencies. As things got a little bit more successful because I'm half French I started picking up a lot of French companies. When Planical Organic started, organic was becoming interesting, so I started focusing very much on organic brands. I was the first person to bring which should interest you in your current life phase.
Charles Redfern:I was the first person to bring an organic formula milk into the country and, funnily, we were fighting nct that um, with some justification, believes that breast milk is best. But we weren't the sort of company that were forcing you know, uh, unethical practices in developing countries or whatever that sort of thing. We, in those situations, we were engaging with the people that didn't like you know, and explaining why our milk was good, why it was natural, why it has all the components and again, so you, you're really having to learn your product, um. And then there were other products that I did and so we were no longer a juice company, but what I did was then I thought there's all this really good italian stuff, but it's all a bit bitty. I'll put it under my brand, and that was my first brand. That was real food. And then fish forever came not too long after and I was doing a german company's fish and I thought this is ridiculous. Why? Uh, because by then I'd already learned I spent a lot of time helping other people's brands out and it's not good for me, uh, because it doesn't build value into my business, but also they go off in different directions. So I said no, I want it done in my own brand and that's slowly. It wasn't deliberate.
Charles Redfern:There was a financial crash in 2008 and that was a triple crash. The currency crashed by 30, everything I was doing was importing, the organic market crashed and then there was a general financial crash. There was a point when people were you know, like your suppliers, they give you. If you're credit worthy, they give you credit lines. Uh, suddenly people were putting credit lines for no reason, because it was a financial crash. You know the whole world had crashed. It's a bit like, well, ukraine covered and all these other brexit, all these things that we've had since. Suddenly you're not sideways, um, and I lost quite a few of my brands at that point because they just didn't. They weren't economically viable. They'd suddenly gone up 30 percent, um, and and the market was getting a lot more serious. Now it's a very serious market with launches especially design-led.
Charles Redfern:You know, in those days you didn't have to be so focused on your design, you were more focused on the product and there was enough of a network in the health food shops of people that were themselves proprietors and were happy to support you but not just happy to support you, wanting to find out who you are. Hey, jay, you're doing this. Oh you, you seem to be saying the right things. I'll ask you a few challenging questions now. I like jay and I'm taking on his product.
Charles Redfern:There was much more personal, personal commitment at the beginning of me being in the organic trade and at the trade shows. People came more, shops came more and they were genuinely interested and you generally go in there when you were doing a. There was this, this kind of exchange of truthfulness. You weren't solving everything. You know you might be in a plastic package and you might, but you know you'd have your. You'd explain why you were in in that and people liked you. And that's when Fish Forever started. We were the only brand really talking about sustainability. Supermarkets started talking about sustainability. Maybe the more advanced ones were talking more or less at the same time as us. Saints Bridge was quite advanced. Others caught up later but we didn't actually on on the point. I'm probably answering future questions, do you mind?
Jay Greenwood:no, no, perfect. It's helping me like I'm just going love listening to help me think about more questions, so so on.
Charles Redfern:On the sustainability front, we literally kind of were there at the beginning of inventing what sustainability was and I remember we organised this talk. The Soil Association used to do a beautiful consumer show in Bristol which was open, free to the public and it was on the water and you could go across from one side to another on the boat and it lovely, and it lasted four or five years down a white stock. I remember we did a talk on sustainable seafood and we invited the mse and the soil association and ourselves and this was really the beginning of the mse, which since then we thought we don't like, uh and we don't like and they've become the definition of sustainability and we spent maybe 20 years fighting that definition. But we built our own definition which ties in with what most small scale people think sustainability is, and it's very much built about what you do as a company, the choices you make. It puts equal weight on the ecological points as it does on the social points. So it's the social impact of your fishing. Who you're choosing, so local, community, are they being negatively or positively affected? It's your choices.
Charles Redfern:And since then I've worked in so many forums and it's more or less what Slow foods came up with 15 years later in one of the forums. It was no, you're fish, and we. We turned that into who, what, where and how have you you know? And so, funnily, I was asking this german guy all these questions about sustainability and he literally was saying to you're the only one that asks me this. And he was very reluctant to answer properly. Right, because he was more worried about protecting his origins. Because the problem with sustainability is you've really got to go be completely open book. This is where it comes from.
Charles Redfern:So we've been pioneers of traceability and sustainability For a long time. You could scan our product and find out all the information, and other people have done it, and there's a French competitor that does it and it's real rubbish what he puts in. It's just a bit of PR, but we actually put the issues Anyway. So our definition of sustainability was very much about what we can do. The official definition, which we're now accepting more, is that it's about fish stocks, and I don't think that's right. But if that's how it's going to be defined, then maybe we'll start. You know, what I wanted to say was we sustainably fish. But this fish stock is not sustainable. It's.
Charles Redfern:It's been fished at a level that's too high, but we're not the guys that are fishing and we can't do anything about that, and I think that's a valid position. It's the same with carbon, it's the same with lots of other things anyway. So we've been. We asked that german guy at the beginning and he wasn't answering us sufficiently. We did a questionnaire this is before. You know. This msc was one year old. We were doing questionnaires and sustainability Supermarkets weren't doing that. And this guy said oh, you're always asking me this. He wasn't answering me properly. So then I had to do parallel research and he was telling me stuff like we don't use dynamite right, and it might sound like okay, and we don't use drift nets. And I said but hang on, drift nets are illegal in the EU and you don't use dynamites for any of our fish. You know dynamite fishing, so how can you call that as a rule of your sustainability? Which is when we started thinking I don't like the way you're answering this.
Charles Redfern:So we went deeper and deeper into it and at the time a guy called Charles Clover had written a book called the End of the Line, which was maybe like one of the first big wake up calls on sustainable fish. So we wrote to the guy you know and we said, hey, we're doing this, we're doing that. And we were just on time and so I re-pivoted uh, I dropped the german guy, uh, over time because I thought you're not answering my. He had a subsequent show. At the point where I was saying, right, this isn't going to go on, he said everybody's asking me the questions you've been asking me now. It's funny so.
Charles Redfern:But by then I'd lost faith because I I had to have transparency and I was learning so much about tuna from charles's clover clover's book. So, although we had written the questionnaire and we weren't in these difficult places where a lot of the tuna industry still sources from, even though they call themselves sustainable, it was a wake-up call and amazingly, I think a year after, but unbeknownst to me, the Greenpeace started a global campaign on sustainable tuna and we were at that point that we made the right decisions, the right sourcing decisions. I'd gone out to the Maldives'd uh, tried to talk to the factories and you know it's research, but it's doing proper research and questioning yourself, um, so that's a little bit the story of fish forever and um, what uh insights do you wish?
Jay Greenwood:maybe people knew or understood about sort of sustainability around the fishing market and what it actually means I none. Of those questions are really easy to answer so, which is why a lot of people default to something like msc, and msc is not universally backed.
Charles Redfern:Msc is very msc is brilliant on the research that they do. You can't find a better. You can't find a better source of research. It's the definitional side that I don't like with the MSC. So they're very lax on methods, fishing methods and they have this kind of improvement system and we've always been really high end. So in the round I'm ready to accept that lots of fisheries have got problems and you don't just drop them. You know that's part of the supermarket discussion. What's the point of us dropping this fishery? It'll only sell to someone that's worse than us. We've got to accompany it on the journey to better.
Charles Redfern:But then you don't call that sustainability, let alone, which is where the MSC supporters have been saying that they're the best thing in sustainability and that's where we've been very offended because we think of it as an improvement project and they support things that are high risk. Fine, if you're trying to improve it, but don't call it sustainable. That, I would say, is particularly tuna based. In things like other fisheries there's other problems and in certain fisheries things like fish stock are potentially more important because all the methods are okay. In tuna you also have rivalry between industrial boats and local boats, so there's a strong social component. I buy from industrial boats in Scotland. I have no qualms about that, because literally everyone who's fishing that fish is an industrial boat. There hasn't been an industry that's been replaced and the method is very, very, very targeted.
Charles Redfern:So we have this who, what, why? Where we really look at the things, we have a 38-point RAG system. Rag means red, amber, green, which is more or less what the Marine conservation society does. Uh, and we go through this, but we will. We also look at political indices for the social components. Say, we were finding something in mexico and we realized that mexico was highly corrupt and they shoot journalists and there's mafias. And then we'd say, oh, we've got to be really careful of the kind of people we're working with in mexico. If it's a nice little fishing cooperative, fine, you don't condemn everyone, but you've got to be aware. And we put that awareness front and centre and we're very, very careful to choose methods that are targeted where there isn't bite catch and where there isn't damage.
Jay Greenwood:Yeah, that's really interesting because it's looking at sustainability on a much wider spectrum than you say just like almost like the labelling, just for pr, rather than actually focusing on what sustainability is. I think really interesting. I wanted to dig in and talk about um because you've been in the industry for a long time now. You've seen a lot of stuff. What's because you mentioned one there where it was about products now are obviously quality of the product is one thing, but almost the labeling of it and the visual element of it is is as or more important. Are there any other changes that you've seen over time?
Charles Redfern:that's you know that's really been a change in the industry I think the I do think that the honesty has gone out of it and I do think that even at the small brand side, uh, so, for example, in sustainability, I do think we were better in a world where people said we're not a sustainable brand here, we're a chocolate brand and we're about the pleasure of chocolate, and if you want a sustainable chocolate brand, go and find it there. But now there won't be a chocolate brand in the world that hasn't got a sustainability piece on their website. But when I started, that wasn't there. So if, even if we, it wasn't simple. If you dig in deep and there's all these other issues and not necessarily covering them all, uh, it was honest. Now dishonesty stuff starts. I tried AI. I said just for fun. I said write me a sustainable fish policy on AI. So easy, it's so easy, it looks good, the AI policy. It'll look better in six months and in 12 months, even better. You could get it almost right.
Charles Redfern:So the honesty has gone out of the market in that, and the reason that's also important is that companies in general not just the grocery trade, but the food industry does this a lot, but I would have thought that the whole world does. Is that it? When this recognizing the truth about capitalism right, because capitalism is, you sell a product and as long as it's legal, you sell it. You don't need the sustainability fluff. I happen to really believe in it, but you don't need to sell a product. Actually, most consumers don't really care about that.
Charles Redfern:So I think that all of that's and then so when you remember that it's really difficult to have the balancing thing, because I think most people, when they're founder, they want to go in and be good, but in the end you've got to make money Right, and maybe we should be all of us should be better consumers and less worried about how good we are as founders, how good we are as founders. And then also, I think there's a lot of oh, I want to be good, but I don't really want to spend, take the risk that being properly good means, because the commercial risk is too high. So there's a lot of compromise, sustainability, and I think if we could just be more honest about all of that right from the start, from big to small, from big to small, we happen to try and be as good as we possibly can, but sometimes it has to be about the commerce. So we've switched suppliers for cheaper suppliers, because otherwise we'd have been out of the market, but it still conforms to our criteria.
Jay Greenwood:I also want to talk about things you see in the industry. You've been through a lot of economic disruptions over your time. We talked there about the 2000s, 2008, covid. Are there any consistent principles that you've used to navigate these challenges, or do you have to adapt to each scenario differently? Or, fundamentally, are they just the same principles, no matter what the scenario is?
Charles Redfern:So I remember saying to an.
Charles Redfern:Indian friend who used to do my IT and he's a friend from uni and I remember saying to him, laughing, we don't have plan A's because plan A never comes round, it never happens, so we've just got a whole load of plan B's. It was like, and he said that's very like Indian philosophy, it's fatalistic. I think he said it's Ayurvedic kind of philosophy and it's a little bit fatalistic. And so my answer, I guess, is that we're trying to be better on it. But even now, you know, we're trying to work on how it does and things like that and sales projections and all of that. But a lot of what I'm doing is saying I think what I say is if we sold this last year, we'll try and sell 10 percent more, but it's not high planning standard more, but it's not a high planning standard um, and so maybe the only thing is that that really runs through.
Charles Redfern:Me is a once bitten, twice shy. So you kind of see things that might happen and they that can be a little bit um, that can help in certain situations. You start asking the right questions. You don't jump into bed with a supplier as fast as you might have done in the old days. You might write a legal contract whereas you wouldn't have done. There's a whole lot of things that you might do. You might give yourself more margins I'm aware of the margin structures a lot more but I do think it's very, very hard to plan for what you can't plan. So a lot of it is flying by the seat of your pants and therefore it is reacting and weirdly.
Charles Redfern:And we're talking a tad about sustainability. We're quite a lot about sustainability, but there's another element which is to do with climate change, and I think you get this in fish anyway, but I'm much more aware now of sudden changes, of sudden big drops in something, and I've been more aware of it now in non-fish products. So suddenly there was a crisis in our rice. There's been a crisis in butter. There's a huge crisis in chocolate you would have read about that because Easter eggs are getting smaller and more expensive or whatever but there are these massive crises that are linked to climate change and us as traders. You know, if you're a chocolate brand, you're going to have to deal with that. But you're a chocolate brand, you're going to have to deal with that. But you're a chocolate brand, you're not selling rosemary crackers on the side. So you're a little bit caught by that. And your chocolate isn't grown in cans. You can't do anything about that, it's grown somewhere else. And I think those sort of disruptions are going to become bigger and bigger and they're a policy challenge, they're a food security challenge.
Charles Redfern:There's some very, very big questions. And how, christ, how you respond. You know, the olive oil went mad. I think you're aware of that. But then Ukraine, before that, had made the sunflower oil and people were trying to say a lot of people try and redo their recipes. But we realized that we'd be far too slow to redo our recipes, so we'd just write it out and also we'd get funnily, you'd get criticized. So in some products we thought we'd reduce, we would move olive oil and mix it with sunflower oil, and then we realized that some of our suppliers who did that we then get some consumer criticism. So they won't pay if you're suddenly going from three pounds to five pounds, but you get criticized if you've changed the recipes.
Charles Redfern:But big companies know this, like you know, like automatically, and they're on it and I don't know if they've got future. They'll have contracts, long term contracts, even long-term contracts won't work. If commodity there's a commodity crisis, that'll be broken, uh, but they'll have ways of managing it. But I think for me it's that one of them is diversification. So I'm very diversified on products. There are lots of products from different places.
Jay Greenwood:You can't do that if your brand that's just in one thing amazing and I wanted to ask you about Brexit and, in your opinion, how big an impact has Brexit been in sort of operating a food brand?
Charles Redfern:So I would say that I was culturally, personally against Brexit, that there were many, many different Brexits in people's minds and all those Brexits didn't agree with each other and some were diametrically imposed. So the more socialist Brexit is diametrically opposed to the more neoliberal, trust type Brexit. When her budget came out, which was so derided, that was a pure brexit budget. That was singapore on thames. That was you know, ditch all the crap, become an efficient economy, just do finance and money laundering and whatever. That's how we should run our economy. Um, so there were lots of these different brexits going on and I although I was against it anyway for cultural reasons as much as anything I was also aware that this single market is really useful and really helpful and takes a weight off smaller businesses' shoulders. So we had decided about four years before Brexit that we were two, three years before Brexit that we should really focus on exporting to Europe because Europe had a proper organic sector, right. So we we realized that in England there was a bunch of health food shops and now are disappearing slowly and but we didn't have a pure organic sector. The promise of planet organic had never happened. When they were founded they were going to be 50 shops. It never happened. When whole foods came to the country they were going to be 50 shops. It never happened. And whole foods isn't even a pure organic player. So that whole movement has did an advance.
Charles Redfern:And yet I I remember, because you remember, I I was traveling and representing a lot of french brands and when I was going out to see even that baby formula milk and I went, they were based in bordeaux and I'd visit the local shops with them in bordeaux to see where they're distributing. And those local shops were like the health shops in england at the time. There were free health shops in England. At the time. There were three health shops in Bordeaux, equivalent. Now you go to Bordeaux, there'll be 10 supermarkets, organic, pure supermarkets, not health shops, supermarkets. You push a trolley around it. You've got five different versions of peaches to choose from. You've got four brands of chocolate it's not just the four, the four top chocolates. You've got earl grey tea, flavor chocolate in organic. Right, you've got everything is 100 organic.
Charles Redfern:And so we started realizing and we thought and it took a while to me, but I thought christ, if you're um, a columbian company and you're doing coffee, you don't think, naturally I'll just sell to the columbian market. You think'll just sell to the Colombian market. You think I'll sell to the international markets? And I thought, why am I, just because I'm English, thinking that my market is England? Because the people that would like me more are in Europe, because there's a proper organic sector where the fish brands aren't as good as us. We've got a real expertise there. We're going to try and sell that. And all that we did before brexit. Uh, and by some miracle, we had a german salesman and said you have to have a warehouse in germany and I didn't. I thought that's really weird. But okay, we'll have a warehouse in germany. And then, when brexit came, we were, we were very on the ball, thinking it's not going to be good, because most of the people I remember right up till the 31st of december, for our we'll just wing it.
Charles Redfern:It won't be bad, they'll come to a deal and you know there was all that last minute deal makers, we thought, no, this isn't going to work. And what's also not going to work is that the reaction of customers. They're going to start saying I don't want to deal with you because, because we'd experienced that with the financial crisis. Oh, england's a risk, we're not a risk. No, we're not a risk. Oh, you know why would the spanish think england was more of a risk at the time? Spain was as much of a risk as england the global crisis. But they've made these kind of jump assumptions. So we immediately set up a subsidiary to be ready before breaking, and I I know that a lot of people that were doing business in europe have stopped doing business at that time. So it's helped us, but it means we've had to double our system and it's not been easy. We've created this whole administrative superstructure to essentially sell the same amount. But in our business strategy, growing in Europe was very important and becoming a European level.
Charles Redfern:Fish Forever is a European level brand. I'm in 2000 shops in France. I'm in Milan and Bari. I'm in Bari, in the south. You know, in Milan you've got 15 shops doing Fish Forever. I'm in Brussels, I'm in Amsterdam. I mean, you know, it's not a nice thing for a brand to be able to say, by virtue of that decision, to say actually, we're not just an English brand. There's this organic market that I know very, very well. Instead of just trying to buy from there, I'm going to sell them.
Jay Greenwood:And why do you think the UK, do you think it's us as consumers, who are just so more forward to just the four big retailers and we just want to go to this big supermarket versus? You mentioned the European sort of system where, like you say, you go down the road and there's an organic shop where you can actually shop fresh, natural food.
Charles Redfern:Yeah, so I think that there might be something in the. I know in a country like france, uh, the cost of employment and national insurance charges, taxes and all that is very, very high. So I don't know how much lower costs are. But I'm always surprised that some shops that I do visit have got a lot of stock. They've got very low staff levels compared to a planet organic. They're out on industrial estates Sometimes see a shop that's three times bigger than, say, a planet organic but with only three employees. And then I also wonder if things like the rents and rates are less. The rents and rates are less. So I wonder if there's something that's really you know, something that your rate of sale in a shop, to make it possible, is lower. I wonder if that's lower.
Charles Redfern:But I also think that in terms of the organic movement itself, there was deliberate construction of an organic alternative over many years and that's what was missing. In the UK, planting organic in a way way started and wanted to do that but never got beyond the commercial challenge of doing it. But in France it's gone, it's happened and they're really fighting conventional retailers as well. But there's a huge difference and in various degrees. There's a huge difference, and in various degrees, is there's such a community of brands that are 100% organic in Europe and there's such a community of shops that are 100% organic. And then they've got the research institutes, they've got the farmers, they've got cooperatives.
Charles Redfern:I remember elections in France where every party, from Marine Le Pen's far right to the far left, is being asked about their organic policy and being invited to TV debates about what are they doing about organic. You know that is very, very strong where in England it's completely ignored by everyone. So I think the politics of it helps. I think there must be an economic angle that I don't quite understand which makes it easier to less burdensome to run a shop maybe slightly easier and I think there's a more cooperative spirit. A lot of the shops are quite cooperative. There's a more kind of alternate capitalism trend going on there.
Jay Greenwood:And I wanted to get your perspective on the organic standard and what's your view on it, whether or not, if there's anything you've changed, whether or not you think it's brilliant for businesses or how it can be a hindrance sometimes. Just your perspective on how you view the organic standard.
Charles Redfern:If maybe there's anything you would do differently no, I mean you, if I've I've had occasion to look at the organic law, and when I look at, I mean I literally mean go and find the little bit that I need to say something. So in wild fish there was all this controversy at one point about how you labeled it, because a wild fish can't be labeled organic. It isn't. It's wild. Organic is a farming system. But then there was this whole. So some people at the beginning might have been saying organic tuna, that's wrong. But there was this legal mention where you'd say tuna in organic olive oil, and then it was challenged and people were saying, no, you can't say that. And so I'd go in and look at the law and say yes, you can, these people are doing it. And then you'd try and find a legal opinion and you'd ask that. And it was. You know there was oh well, we're not sure there was the same thing when the formula milk that we did at the beginning, and you know what were the rules about the ingredients all about? And actually so when you look at the organic oil, it's huge and it's written in legal speak.
Charles Redfern:And if you ever looked at your law on your iPhone, you give up, don't you? You read the first two paragraphs, you think this isn't for me. Yeah, and it's a little bit like that with organic law. So it's quite complicated. There's a lot in it. I'm not the right person to say what's to change it. I'm not the right person to say what's to change. You get a lot of people that say that it's too strict, that it's too restrictive, and strict and restrictive restrictive is more word of saying it's too strict and some, a lot of people say maybe it's a bit, you know, nanny stateish because there's so many regulations. But the true fear. Fear is if an iPhone's got that much regulations, a food system thing has to have a lot of clauses and it's got to be interpreted.
Charles Redfern:So the debate that's going on right now is between regenerative and organic, and by itself regenerative isn't enough because it's self-claimed. So it's a bunch of principles, right, but they're self-claimed and nobody quite agrees on the principles. And then there isn't much necessarily. For example, there's a no-tilling principle in regenerative, but I think it's very good from a carbon point of view not to till, but actually it's not necessarily that practical. Then there's about the depth of tilling that you do, you do a little bit of tilling, so now it's min till and then if you're no till, you're losing. You're using a lot of glyphosate, which are one of the biggest herbicides. So is it good to go down the? You know, is that good and what amount of tilling can you do? And then I've seen some farms that are that are tilling, but in a very traditional way, and I've got amazing carbon storage and they've. That was a vegan farm, in fact, so you can do it veganly or you can do with animals and therefore generalizations don't really work.
Charles Redfern:But where regenerative has a is good if it's on top, if it describes the positive things you can do as an organic farmer, but often by and by itself it's not a standard. It doesn't exist as a standard. It's not controlled. You can say what you want under it, and that's a problem because everybody is regenerative, partly because it isn't strict and to be organic it's very hard and so, yes, some of that's a pain in the arse. You've got inspections every year, you've got rules, you've got. You know it is. It is a complex system and there's an argument to say, well, why are we paying when we're good? Why isn't everybody else paying? And you know so there is subsidies for organic, that sort of thing. Uh, but I don't know that I'm the right person. There's a whole system of how you change organic, how you see and p, and basically there's. There's a legal branch of organic or there's a system of standard setting that people are in.
Jay Greenwood:That I'm not in I want to finish one final question and ask you, if there's any well, you could share any major setbacks or loss in your business journey that maybe turned out to be a crucial learning opportunity and potentially reshaped your approach to business.
Charles Redfern:Yeah, I think these, these sudden hits, you know they're quite difficult, the difficult, the kind of the mega economic, political hits. You also get personal hits in your own supply chain. So we were doing a towards the end of our agencies, we were doing some multigrain chips from America and we got it to quite a high volume. We just kept getting messed around by the supplier. We've had a lot of issues where we get messed around by the suppliers trying to be as kind of um, um analytical as you possibly can about who you're relying on. We've had bad, um, you know, uh, bad go-betweens in terms of our logistic partners. But I think good logistic partners are quite easy to find. But then even we found we moved quite recently we've had a nightmare. So you know, everything looked good, we had, we did proper procedure and it was a nightmare when we moved, uh, had contract, had requirements, had four or five pre-meetings, visited all of that. So that's going back to. You've got to. You've also got to react, uh.
Charles Redfern:But I guess all your eggs in one basket is a difficult one. Making sure that you're relying on who you rely on, trying to be analytical in all parts of your business. It's hard. You're holding lots of plates. You're spinning a lot of plates. You're looking at cash flow. You're looking at profitability. You're looking at sales growth. You're looking at how you invest. It's a very, very complex environment. It's far harder to do product than it is to do a service business and it's far harder to do a food business than a different product business, because your margins are small and you've got all these legal you know labeling requirements, nutrition requirements, claims requirements. You don't get that on a lot of other products to the same degree, so you've just got to be on top of it.
Jay Greenwood:Basically, Well, I think that's a brilliant place to finish up the interview and I just want to say thank you for coming on Farne and also to creating such amazing products and focusing on the integrity, sustainability and communities. It's a great product doing and a great company doing amazing things, so thank you.
Charles Redfern:Thank you very much, joe, nice to meet you again.
Jay Greenwood:As always, guys, thank you so much for listening, really appreciate the support and if you guys like it and you're enjoying what you're listening to, please like and subscribe and write a review. We'd really appreciate it Again. We'll be back doing this weekly and, yeah, if you want to know more about starting a food business, head to wwwjgreenwoodcom. But, guys, as always, thank you and be great.