A look back at a year to be proud of, and a look forward towards plans for a big 2025. I have ended up writing a lot so please use the content table below and skip to what interests you most. I have been very open with our numbers from our monthly P&L to how much I have been paid 🙃.
2024 in review
👨🏽💻 Engineering progress
I began selling veg boxes via the back of a Landrover in 2013, in what now feels a very analogue world. Today Growing Good is a pure tech business and that is how we are happy to be judged. We keep the £% spend on engineering as high as possible - the talented folk that write the code I pretend to understand 🤥. I doth my virtual-cap to Renee and his team, who have laid the foundations for the many great things to come.
To give you a sense of how productive we have been over the last 12 months, here’s a quick recap. These are just highlights, you’ll find links to the full release notes below.
🤓 Here are links to the full release notes
📈 Emerging data on the impact of GG software
We made some early noise about how Sandy Lane Farm’s sales increased by 30% in their first 12 months of using Growing Good. We had access to SLF’s pre-GG data to be able to make that comparison, which we don’t, and haven’t asked for, from other users.
What we can look at is a like for like (LFL) comparison over time since using GG. To be credible, we will only look at ‘year on year’ LFL data (we all know how seasonal sales are through the year). In early September 2023 we had (just) 9 established users on our platform (we had one ‘start-up’ and one ‘seasonal’ user that are not statistically credible to include). We can now compare sales performance of those 9 users in the 14 weeks from 37-50, 2023 vs 2024. Below you will see an 11% growth in sales across the user group, which is a brilliant story given the headwinds faced over the last 12 months inside our niche of retail and beyond. Statistically the most similar retail market has struggled, over the last 6 months our economy as a whole has contracted, and we hear anecdotally that many established box schemes outside of our user group have found trading difficult. 11% growth feels very impressive vs the market. 🥳
Profitable growth is vital
The 10.99% overall sales growth is made-up of a 6.5% increase in average basket spend and a 4.12% growth in number of orders. This feels like balanced, profitable growth. Doing ‘more with the same’ (or a similar) cost-base.
Your numbers (really) matter
They are what we’ll ultimately be judged by when we talk to the wider-market about being driven by ‘making small-scale work’. The GG ‘sales chart’ naturally looks impressive because we are regularly onboarding new users, but it’s your numbers, year on year, that we’ll always measure our success by.
Here is the GG sales (by volume) chart if you’d like to have a nosey… Given that our marketing spend to-date has been exactly £0, we’re really happy with the start made. Still a little way to go until the fees received equal the money we’re spending each month.
🌱 Growing influence
We have benefited via support from the Soil Association and are working collaboratively with them to understand the local, organic, home delivery market and to work out how best our tech can bring efficiency to annual inspections and (hopefully) reduce certification fees for smaller licensees in the future.
George is now an ‘official’ Soil Association ambassador and Growing Good are part of a data panel that will have access to (anonymised) data that will help us all make better commercial decisions in the future.
Here’s an article written by the SA earlier in the year; 
George and myself are both involved twice at the ORFC in January, one session that we’re leading, titled ‘A new dawn for the humble veg box’, additionally George is speaking at a session with the OGA and I am involved with the Soil Association around ‘making organic work at small-scale’, alongside Sean at Organic North whom many of you will know.
Full disclosure regarding my ‘£0 on marketing' claim: We are a sponsor of the ORFC in Jan 25, the first money spent outside of developing the core product.
Better Food Traders
On Tuesday 28th January I am hosting a webinar on behalf of Better Food Traders as part of their business support week entitled: “Customer insights and analytics, what good looks like for local veg schemes.”
BFT website: 
Sustainable Food Grown Locally | Better Food Traders
Organic Growers Alliance
In March George is hosting an ‘OGA on the farm’ event at Sandy Lane Farm entitled “Keep it lean: An on farm workshop on veg boxes and caterpillar tunnels” I’ll be speaking about data, insights and best practice.
Tickets available to book here:
Keep it Lean: An on-farm workshop on veg boxes and caterpillar tunnels
👀 Our product in 2025
Wow. So much to say about plans for the next 12 months - after growing sales volume on our platform by 146% in 2024 we expect next year to bring significant growth too, we’ll maintain our tech-first, lean-approach to business but will also be aiming for continued productivity gains.
Here’s a very top-line summary of what you can expect to see 2025 bring on our platform:
1. The now
New store-front analytics and specialised shopper metrics - conversions, subscription behaviour and more, plus an improved data-hub within the admin and a new landing dashboard - expect to see this very early in the year
2. The necessary
Refactoring our API. It’s big and important work but hard to make sound exciting! It will result in even better site and admin performance, increased speed of future development and more. Like upgrading the engine in a tractor
3. The need
Once the API work is done we’ll introduce more comprehensive and intelligent stock control with an inventory management upgrade
Product management dashboard; a new table view where you can edit stock, price, swaps and check availability, in one place
4. The great
The planned functionality we’re most excited about is our marketplace. It’s going to change the way you can increase your range (by any amount of products), risk-free. Zero-admin, total ownership and a great margin. This will be accompanied by significant improvements to the store-front including UX improvements. Potentially game-changing for small-scale local retail 🤯
5. The ‘what’s next?’
AI-powered customer support, automated customer marketing and more - we have a huge list of further planned improvements already in our development roadmap - if you would like to influence it then please get in touch and tell us how! ☺️
🤓 More detail on the numbers
💳 Payment processing costs and performance
A big cost for all of retail is payment processing. It feels expensive, and most of us don’t understand it in much detail. We use Stripe as you know, and as part of the commercial terms negotiated on behalf of all our users, we pass on a significant (~50%) discount on their ratecard prices. Stripe will rarely negotiate with any one business with a t/o lower than £3m pa, so this is a great example of how we benefit from working together to create scale.
We maintain a good relationship with Stripe and are in active conversations about how we can unlock even greater discounts as we continue to grow payment volume as a group. Watch this space.
In November I did a little data-analysis to identify potential opportunities to improve our payment success rates and was pleasantly surprised by what I found.
Here’s a quick summary
In the 12 months to November 24, 99% of payments attempted on the platform were successful, this is the figure after 'retries'. The 'raw' figure is actually 94.35%, so we're successfully capturing 4.65% of the 5.65% first-time failures.
Of the 1% of failures remaining, 0.54% were due to lack of funds (outside of Stripe control). 0.46% were made up of other technical reasons which almost always sit with the bank of the end-customer.
78.6% of payments were made using a debit card, 21.26% using a credit card.
0.14% are pre-paid cards - these have a relatively high % failure rate, so our advice is to discourage these if at all possible. At some point in future we can look at whether we can or should continue to allow them - though there is a consideration about affordability and maintaining access to local/organic, there is a likelihood of low income families using them most.
Credit cards (CC’s) have a higher payment success rate vs DC's, so although they are more expensive for us to process, in this regard we like them!
About 25% of CC spend are the significantly more expensive American Express - making up around 4.5% of the overall total spend. Whether to allow AMEX is an obvious question, but given that they no doubt help with retention and overall success rates, I am not minded to suggest we disable them just yet. I’d be interested to know if anyone feels differently. To be clear - the variability in payment processing costs is a risk for GG, our average costs have consistently been close enough to the 1.25% that we pass-on, so are happy to continue ‘as we are’.
Background features that GG pays for
As part of our service, we pay for the auto-updating of customer cards to increase payment success rates, for a growing % of retail banks Stripe is able to automatically update details held when a new debit card is issued, without the customer needing to update the details themselves. Many thousands of payments have been successfully processed this way since the tech has been active on our platform.
Stripe also have some clever tech that creates something similar to a ‘network token’ that is used to validate a payment instead of using ‘the long card number’ - once this is created (and linked to a customer’s bank account) it can be used to ‘build trust’, resulting in greater ongoing payment success rates, vital for our subscription model where payments are initiated by us, rather than the cardholder.
There are other features that we are charged for (GG) that are less interesting, but all go towards delivering better results and hopefully make a significant ‘bottom line’ difference to you.
👾 Our progress vs the competition
I’m not a huge fan of any negative ‘my packing shed is bigger than yours’ chat, ultimately we operate in a planet-first niche of the food system and are fighting a similar battle, aligned in many ways. However, approaching the end of our 2nd year of trading (Barcombe went live with us in Feb 2023) I think it is feels ‘ok’ to consider how we ‘stack-up’, and how we are benefiting from maintaining a very product-first strategy over our time to-date.
💰 Fees
One of the interesting take-outs from my analysis of Stripe performance was how we now offer much cheaper payment processing than our closest competitor in the UK, Ooooby. It’s hard to state exactly why that is (we’re at 1.25% vs their ~2.3%) but in part it is likely due to how our modern system architecture has been intentionally configured to function as a platform. While that may sound abstract, in this case it impacts our ability to integrate with Stripe in such a way to enable big price discounting. I am confident that this principle is true across most measures (sales, customer retention, support, productivity, time saving etc) but fee rates are an objective comparable.
In reaction to recently increased payment processing costs Ooooby have cut their own portion of the fee, yet the overall price of using their platform remains higher than ours. The take-out here is that not only is GG cheaper to use overall, but we retain 2.5% of the fee vs 1.9%, this is a significant difference. Retaining a higher % of the fees within our community has an obvious and significant benefit.
Maximum GG fee = 2.5% platform + 1.25% Stripe = 3.75%
Ooooby fee = 1.9% platform + [1.3% + (20p / ~1%)] Stripe = 4.2%
As mentioned we have grown sales volume on our platform by 146% in 2024 and are confident strong growth will continue into 2025. With £0 marketing spend to-date and a very ‘lean’ team, we have grown to £7m of annualised platform sales inside 2yrs, 70% of where Ooooby are having benefited from a 3yr ‘first to market’ head-start and what appears to be well-established ad, marketing and sponsorship spend. I give you my assurance that while you will see GG increase marketing activity in 2025, it will not come at the cost of investment in the product. Example - our own GG website is very basic and long overdue renewal, I am ‘at peace’ with that having made an active choice to prioritise our time on product development.
❌ GG will never be a consumer brand
I have recently noted that Ooooby are investing in building a consumer-facing site to drive shoppers to their users - while on the surface this sounds logical (and will enable nationwide mass-marketing campaigns), I wanted to state that an equivalent of this is not in our plans. In fact, it goes against one of our founding principles which is to make small-scale genuinely work, for GG to sit quietly in the background, trying to enable the market, not to own or control it. Our development will continue to help you become more individual and a match for your own customers, while giving you the productivity tools to make your business really work. It’s a more challenging and long-term strategy, but we firmly believe the correct and sustainable one. After all, we’re here to help decentralise the food system, and definitely not to create another big consumer brand.
🏋🏽♀️ Running a lean operation, our P&L and views on future investment
We operate a lean business and will continue to do so - looking after every £, making sure we leverage all productivity tools available to us that help maximise how we re-invest the fees you pay, in turn helping you retain as much value inside your veg box as possible.
The net fee income on our current annualised sales volume of £7m results in us making around a £5k monthly loss. (We have just filed annual accounts and have made a loss of £150k in the year to March 24, having made a £50k loss in the year before). While the current £5k loss per month is a considerable amount, it is in line with budget and in the context of similar companies to ours we are making very good progress towards breakeven. That is helped by us keeping our wage bill as affordable as possible.
Since we have started working on the GG concept, George (who is not full-time) has not been paid and I have been paid a total of £30,000 over the 33 months since we incorporated. I haven’t been paid anything this financial year and don’t plan draw a salary until we are profitable. Renee is paid a much reduced amount for someone of his experience and talent.
To date we have raised £250k of SEIS qualifying investment from our ‘angels’; 3 mission-aligned individuals that believe in what we are doing and have no guarantee that we’ll be successful enough to deliver them a proper and deserved return for their support. Our 2 lead investors are long term veg box customers of Sandy Lane Farm. We have a couple of minor loans but maintain a positive balance sheet and cash in the bank.
We currently have a team of Renee + 4 engineers, myself and Martin, with George on projects, plus a small number of consultants that we partner with on an ad-hoc basis (design work for example).
While we don’t rule anything out in terms of future potential investment, we are committed to positioning ourselves where we can make decisions on our own terms, in the best interests of our business and therefore our users. We will only ever consider investment from a mission-aligned source, if at all.
This puts us in a very different position to others in our market, some who look to be running monthly losses many times bigger than ours and are obliged in the long-term to repay multi-million £ investments.
If you have any questions on the above I am more than happy to chat them through. We founded the business with an ideal of ‘radical transparency’, and that’s what we’ll stick to.
🦄 A reminder of our ‘Let’s grow together’ reward program
With the above fresh in the mind, I wanted to remind you of our referral incentive that runs until the end of March 2025. If you know anyone running a veg scheme that may benefit from using our platform, please introduce us! Let’s not give advertising money away when we could keep it within our community! See here for more detail ‘Let’s Grow Together’ reward program
⟪ Cracking the veg box code ⟫
I wanted to finish by talking about data (again!). Hopefully you have felt the benefit of using our data hub in recent months, we are now able to track metrics and draw insights on data in what we believe to be a first in our market.
As I type we are in final testing for our store-front analytics integration that we’ll be making available to you inside your admin early next year. We have invested the time to build and configure event-based analytics that are bespoke to our model, so we can help you track meaningful conversion metrics and more. We’re also building the dashboard for you to help extract maximum value from the data in an easy-to-digest format. The tracking is fully anonymised so full privacy protection for your customers, continuing a cookie-free shopping experience. We’ll be using the data to understand how we can optimise the shopping experience, and for nothing else.
The introduction of store analytics, in combination with our data hub (of which an upgraded version will also be released early next year) will result in us being able to make data-driven decisions about how we invest our time most productively.
The project keeping me up late at night right now is deciding how best to measure customer retention in an optimal way for our model. George and I spent some of last Friday night looking at a visualisation of his long-term customer shopping behaviour (rock and roll eh?) and realised that customer acquisition is really not holding back further success - it’s retention. A high % of weekly orders are what you’d term ‘very long term’ customers, but the retention rates for newer customers is surprisingly low. I am not confident enough to give you a precise number right now, but know that you need to churn through a surprisingly high numbers of new customers to convert one into a long-term regular shopper. First we need to nail down the correct metric calculation, then we can work on ‘the why’, then we can work on engineering the solution.
Together we’re working towards cracking the ‘veg box code’ and are determined to make 2025 the year to do it!
☎ Schedule a chat
If you’d like to have a chat to me about any of the above you should be able to find a time to do so below, I have made regular slots available each week. Any other comments drop me a note via steve@growing-good.co.uk.
Thanks for making it this far, thank you for being a valued member of our community, have a very happy Christmas and hopefully a well-deserved break. See you in 2025!
Steve