Packing Away to the Max

Necessity is the Mother of Invention

Pippa and Jacob busy in the packshed

This week sees us packing and delivering over 190 veg bags — the most we have done in a single week since lockdown, and the highest weekly average we have ever achieved. All of these bags are packed in a room little more than 5m × 5m in size, in the barn next to the garden.

As you can see from the picture (top), this requires very efficient stacking and sorting of veg and fruit on our packing days, using floor space as well as three different levels of shelving. It also requires a lot of agility from the team. On Wednesdays there are four of us working in this small space, sorting veg into boxes and bags ready for packing — it’s a wonder we don’t bump into each other more often.

When we first moved into this room, we would never have thought it possible to pack so many bags in such a small space in such a short period of time — from mid-morning Wednesday, when we receive our wholesale order, through to late Thursday afternoon, when everything is packed and the pack shed is tidied again. But, incrementally and bit by bit, we have adjusted our ways of working and our facilities to make our operations as slick as possible. In an ideal world, we would have two to three times more floor space, but without that option we have had no choice but to innovate.

We are also really chuffed with the launch of the new Ooooby user interface this week. The web shop has been completely revamped to give it a more modern feel and to make the shopping experience more intuitive. It also integrates well with our separate website, which you can find by clicking the Home tab on Ooooby. Ooooby is now the largest provider of web-shop platforms in the UK for organic delivery services like ours. They are passionate about localising our food system, supporting organic systems, and are great people to work with too.

We hope you like the new web shop as much as we do. If you have any questions or feedback, do get in touch — we always love to hear from you.