Merton Lockdown Stories #2: The fate of our food suppliers
The second in our series of features, Merton Lockdown Stories, bringing you news of how the College community is adapting and responding to these strangest of times.
Our Head Chef, Mike Wender, explains what the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic has been on the businesses, large and small, that supply one of the essentials of college life - food - and what you can do to help them through these difficult times:
There are 38 colleges, several University of Oxford Departments and Faculties, Oxford Brookes University, schools and approximately 650 restaurants, cafes and similar outlets within the Oxford ring road - that's a lot of kitchens which would ordinarily be needing daily supplies.
In college catering terms Merton is medium-sized; we have 41 food suppliers. On any ‘normal’ term day we have somewhere between five and ten food deliveries. Many of these deliveries are from large general suppliers who - fortunately - have a good number of large multinational clients, including the NHS and care homes, which should enable them to stay afloat through this crisis.
However, some of our deliveries are from small independents, those who excel in specialist ingredients not required by multinationals. Overnight, their orders - from Oxford and elsewhere - disappeared. Much of their stock had to be donated to charities, but unfortunately some had to be destroyed. For example, our mushroom growers were left with over 800kg of amazing mushrooms which had to be composted.
Our British & European cheese supplier suffered an initial 90% loss of business – you may have read in the press that there is a real danger that some of the truly artisanal British cheeses will disappear, as happened widely during the Second World War. Many cheese producers have stocks of maturing cheeses which are going out of date in their ripening rooms. There is some good news in all this - since there is almost no commercial fishing happening, some of the more at-risk fish stocks may start to recover.
Luckily some of our suppliers are fighting back – they have begun to set up home deliveries of their specialist products both locally and by post - and that is where you can help. Please explore this list and consider placing orders – we all love good food, and I guarantee from personal experience you won’t be disappointed with what you receive!
- Carroll's Heritage Potatoes
- Belazu - Mediterranean food and Middle Eastern ingredients
- Forman & Field
- Vegetarian Express - vegetarian food supplier
- La Fromagerie
- SH Jones - wines and spirits
- Harvey & Brockless - speciality foods producer and distributor
- The Bread Factory
- Mayfield Eggs
- Delicioso - the Spanish food company
- Keepr's - honey and jam (also: gin!)
- Kingdom Coffee - also tea and chocolate
- Nouri - vegan truffles
- Charles MacLeod - home of the Stornoway Black Pudding
If you are able to share at least some of your food purchases between your usual suppliers and one or more from this list, it will really help these businesses – it’s taken me several years to amass such high quality suppliers, and I’d hate to be without their support in future. Perhaps you could share an order with neighbours or relatives? (Whilst following social distancing rules, of course.)
And if you live near Leamington Spa, do look at Aubrey Allen for meat and cheese.
