2025: Growing together

Here’s a short retrospective on the last 12 months and a little about our plans for 2026.

2025 started as it meant to go on. George and I both hosted two sessions at the Oxford Real Farming Conference, then a webinar during the Better Food Traders business support week followed (Building a data-driven understanding of local veg box business - slides available here), followed by a workshop at Sandy Lane Farm on behalf of the Organic Growers Alliance.

We enjoyed meeting many likeminded folk at Groudswell in the Summer, and were delighted to be awarded ‘Best Organic Network’ at the Soil Association’s BOOM awards (where George was also a finalist in the ‘Organic Champion’ category). More recently we enjoyed cheering Flourish’s stunning win as ‘Best Food Producer’ at the BBC Food & Farming Awards. Congrats again guys!

We have grown sales supported on our platform by nearly 60% this year (Nov 24 v 25) and will finish ahead of our budget - amazing! Most pleasingly, performance across our community is broadly excellent, with some great like-for-like sales results to be proud of. If you missed our recent deep-dive into how Sandy Lane have grown sales by 54% over the last 3 years you can catch up on it here.

We look forward welcoming new members to our community in January, by which time we’ll be supporting around 10,000 orders per week and £11m+ of annualised sales volume. We’re now reaching a scale where modest improvements to average basket spend and customer retention can have a significant impact on how many more families eat locally each week and how many extra tonnes of seasonal produce moves through shorter supply chains. The opportunity to play a small part of increasing this impact in 2026 is an exciting prospect.

It’s been another year that has seen regular releases and big improvements in our platform capability. I’m most proud of how our priorities and decision-making has been influenced by our community, both by you as a platform ‘user’ but also your customers, who offered such valuable feedback to help shape our store improvement project, which remains our current engineering focus. Remind yourself of some of the early customer feedback via this blog post.

Free web design consultation

Many of the stores built using our software were done so before the recent (and fairly chunky) updates to our content designer. Even bigger leaps forward are imminent, soon you’ll be able to nest ‘blocks within blocks’ and choose from a range of ‘themes’, which will result in far greater design options.

We know this may feel overwhelming to those that lack relevant experience, skills or just the time to utilise - so we’re doing a couple of things to help;

Community Discord

It’s been great to see how activity in our community discord channels has picked up in recent months - some of the ideas and experience shared has been really valuable. If you have a question that you think might be better answered by a community member - don’t be afraid to get involved!

Veg box drop in sessions

Every Tuesday at 1pm & 5pm George is online (via Google Meet) to answer ANY questions that you may have, system, process, retail or growing related. It doesn’t have to be a question either - it could be an idea you’d like to air or a second opinion you’d like to get. You are welcome to join and leave whenever suits - no need to stay for the 30mins. Joining details are available on Discord > gg-user-group > veg-box-drop-in-session.

Stock management

Our job is to build the tools you need to make life running a local food business more productive, enjoyable and hopefully, profitable.

We’ll continue to shape our engineering design based on your input - you may have been contacted recently by Martin regarding a survey and interview on the overhaul of our stock management system. It’s a large and complex area of work and it’s vital that we utilise all knowledge available before making key decisions about how data is organised. If you are yet to book a time for interview, I’d encourage you to do so - the work we invest now will pay us back and more in the future.

A ground-breaking supplier model

Some of you may have noticed that over the last 4-5 weeks we have been piloting a new supplier model on the Sandy Lane Farm store, adding 100 top-selling lines from Yoyo Grocery Co in their ground-breaking returnable and reusable packaging. In some ways the pilot has been an overwhelming success (it added ~£1k per week of sales when we aligned the customer marketing and shopping window fully), but we have faced troubles with fulfilment, having been let down by Royal Mail in more than one week. The learning has been invaluable and we’re getting closer to finding the right system - it’s why we run pilots in the first place. We’re confident that everyone in our community will benefit from this early work and will keep you informed of progress.

A supply-chain of knowledge

In the last year we have invested time building a deeper understanding of how our wider supply chain works, where friction exists and where opportunities may present to remove burdensome, complex admin. I have spent a day with Sean from Organic North and similar time with Alex from Langridge Organics - both wonderful businesses operating quite different models. We have spent time understanding the challenges faced by local food hubs, talking to last-mile e-bike/cargo-bike co’s about how we can integrate best with their needs. More to follow next year.

From an engineering perspective, I asked Renee to share what he’s most proud of and what he’s most looking forward to.

In technical lingo:

We see Growing Good as a connective layer in the local food ecosystem. Our long-term vision is to improve access to local organic food by enabling stronger interoperability across the industry, bringing growers, suppliers, logistics partners and complementary technologies closer together through smarter data connectivity.

In less technical terms:

We exist to help strengthen the local food movement. We’re here to connect the people and systems that make it work - from farms and hubs to delivery teams and community food projects. When those links become stronger and more joined-up, local organic food becomes more accessible to all and stops being a niche option - it becomes part of everyday life.

We’re excited about where our community will take us next and are looking forward to welcoming a number of new members in the new year, including some well-known names such as Locavore in Glasgow, Oxton Organics in Worcestershire, and Living Larder on the Isle of Wight.

For the small-print and any questions please drop me an email directly here.

Finally I wanted to thank all involved in our community again - it’s been another year to be proud of, box schemes, growers, retailers, food hubs, wholesalers, bike couriers, bakers and candlestick makers. The Soil Association, the OGA, BFT and the Real Farming Trust - amazing.

Thank you to everyone involved in the GG team. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all.

We’ll be on emergency cover only between Christmas and New Year - like most we’ll be hoping to recharge and return full of energy come the first week of Jan!

Thanks again

Steve and the team.