The Cornish Foodbox Company

Tor is a friend from back in my journalism training days down in Falmouth, Cornwall. She’s born and bred Cornish and, like so many people who are born in that beautiful part of the world, the pull back to the Cornish coast is too strong to resist. 

So after a long stint abroad reporting and then opening and running her own dive shop in Indonesia, she upped sticks with her husband and two kids, and headed back to the homeland…and the Cornish Food Box Company is what she and her sister did next….

The business is such a simple, but ingenious idea and is exactly what it says on the box. They source high quality seasonal fruit and veg, fish, meat, pasties…and much much more, all grown and produced in Cornwall and deliver it in boxes to your house.  For Cornwall, entrepreneurial ventures like Tor and Lucy’s are the life-blood for kick-starting the region’s economy and as Tor explains below, Cornwall has become a magnet for start-ups and entrepreneurs. 

Since I took these pictures (a good 18 months ago) Tor and Lucy have expanded the business - a new location in Truro and many more exciting projects in the pipeline. 

Were you always going to set up your own business in Cornwall?

We set up the company because we really wanted to live here; we wanted to move back to Cornwall. But there aren’t tons of jobs here. But there are lots of cool young people running their own businesses and that is really what we wanted to do. We wanted to be in charge of our own destiny so that any decision we make comes back to us at the end of the day. We also wanted to start a business to do something good for the local economy, to be able to employ local people.  

Is food the critical passionate element in your business?

My sister Lucy, who I run the business with, is a really brilliant baker and we were thinking about various different ideas about how the business would go. We thought maybe we could make bread and deliver it to people locally and then we thought well if you’re going to make the bread why wouldn’t you sell them the butter, why wouldn’t you sell bacon and salt and eggs and all kinds of other things and that’s really where the idea was born.  And then for us the critical idea was having the clear message about what we do and that is that everything has to be local.  So that’s where the name the Cornish Food Box Company came.  We are exactly what we say we are.

Was it harder than you anticipated setting up on your own?

Starting a business you need a certain set of skills, I think the most important thing is to have a passion for what you do and really want to make it work. There is no getting away from the fact that we work 80 hours per week and we don’t get paid lots of money at the moment. But hopefully that will change and all the hard work will be worth it.

Looking back at the initial challenges you faced what kind of advice would you give to people about to set up on their own?

There really are plenty of challenges. You need to understand that you are buying something and selling it out and you need to make your profit at the end of the day. You also need to have an idea about what your message is and how you are going to sell that to people. You are going to have really great days and really rubbish days but you have to be able to work through that because you really believe in your concept and yourself. Self-belief in what you are doing is crucial and being prepared to put the work in. 

Do the upsides to running your own business outweigh the difficulties?

Everything is an upside in running your own business  – it turns into what you live, breathe work, eat really.  We believe we are doing something good for the local economy and that we are putting back into society with our business and that is the main aim of it for us.  And hopefully it’s something that my children might want to take over and it develops and grows into a family business in the future. I think that’s the upside. We’re very proud of what we’ve achieved and we’ve worked very hard to do that.

…….I also LOVE that they are doing their bit for the give #wonkyveg a chance revolution…check out their campaign on instagram