Food Circle Supermarket Enhances eCommerce Delivery with Parcelhub

Over a third of all food produced globally goes to waste. While many provisions are in place to reduce it, the UK makes the highest amount of food waste in Europe. The UK throws away around 9.5 million tonnes of food in a single year – even though 8.4 million people in the UK are in food poverty. Billions of pounds are wasted each year when food is disposed of unnecessarily.

Food waste is usually positioned as an 'end-of-pipe' problem, with the responsibility of reduction primarily placed on consumers. However, retailers are routinely identified as responsible for a significant proportion of food waste, often due to poor stock management, dips in demand and product faults.

Thankfully businesses such as South Yorkshire-based Food Circle Supermarket exist to capitalise on retailers' and brands' surplus stock in a way that benefits consumers. Providing significant cost-savings and minimal compromise in terms of quality; by securing supply from major protein, health and wellness retailers who would rather have the extra warehouse space for new stock and selling food to price-conscious consumers.

About South Yorkshire-based Food Circle Supermarket
Food Circle Supermarket is an online surplus food and drinks eCommerce business focusing on the sports nutrition and healthy snacking industries. They purchase surplus food and drink, such as short-dated, old branded and excess products from some of the most well-known brands in their sector, and re-distribute them to customers across the UK to help avoid product waste.

Due to the surplus nature of their products, they can offer a discount on the usual high street price of the vast majority of products to help people live healthier for less whilst stopping perfectly good food from going to waste.

Founders Paul and James worked in the surplus food sector with Company Shop group, one of the largest surplus food organisations in the industry. Starting as graduates in 2014, Paul and James became Business Development Managers, helping Company Shop win key new accounts before departing in 2017 to pursue their own venture in surplus food.

Extraordinary growth
In the first year of trading, the Shopify retailer turned over £35k and has expanded to a £1.7m turnover business in 2021. Food Circle now has an entire team of seven people and a 6000 square foot warehouse and office in Dinnington near Sheffield, just a short distance from Parcelhub's South Yorkshire depot.

James Barthorpe, Co-Founder of Food Circle Supermarket, added: "Our customers are everyday people across the UK who live busy lifestyles and like to keep active. Our model allows them to stock up their food cupboards with quick healthy snacks, protein bars, and products such as cereals and protein shakes at a discount off the RRP. Our customers stay fuelled with nutritional foods for the gym and other activities in their daily lives.

"Most of our customers fall in the 18-35 demographic with a reasonably even female/male split.

"We are keen to expand into new markets, such as families – we aim to develop our product range over the next five years to allow people to stock up on a broader range of goods and fill up their food cupboards for less, whilst helping to tackle food waste.

A diverse product range 
A large proportion of Food Circle Supermarket's range is energy/protein bars or similar on-the-go energy/protein products (such as protein cookies, brownies, flapjacks, crisps, and ready-to-drink shakes. Their critical suppliers in this area are Fulfil, Clif, Grenade, Barebells, Oatein, Battle Bites, Pro2Go, Mountain Joe's, and UFit. Sheffield-based FCS also stock more general snacking items such as Kind bars and products for more specialist dietary requirements such as Peakz, Loro Crisps (Vegan), and KetoKeto (Keto friendly). FCS also stocks products in the breakfast market, such as Fuel10K porridges and granolas.

"We are currently the only surplus food business focused on the healthy snacking/sports nutrition sector".

Discovering Parcelhub
Paul Simpson, the Co-Founder, added: "As a new business in 2018, finding a cost-effective delivery partner was a big challenge. As we grew as a business, managing costs has been another challenge.

"As we were doing relatively small volumes in our early days when we started working with Parcelhub in 2018, Parcelhub were the perfect partner for the short and long term. With a "pooled volume" model, we accessed cost-effective services, which were more challenging to attain directly from carriers at that stage. Parcelhub had the capacity and infrastructure to be a long-term partner as our business grew, proving them to be an effective solution for various business sizes.

"Parcelhub has helped us to manage costs as we've grown as a business by always providing competitive rates based on our performance and volumes. They also make it simple to track shipping costs, with one invoice covering services from all carriers. Additional data breaks down those costs, and even more detailed information around costs & carrier service provision is provided in regular review meetings with an account manager."

"With Parcelhub, we benefit from dedicated and proactive account management, multi-carrier flexibility, great customer service and seamless integration with Shopify."

" Parcelhub was very easy to get set up. The Sales team were accommodating in explaining how their systems worked, providing pricing quotes and a range of options, and getting our account set up promptly, and IT made it easy to integrate with our website so we could start shipping."

"Evri and Yodel are our leading two carriers at present. We primarily use Evri's standard and next-day NPOD services and Yodel Xpress and Xpect 24hr services. Customer service is our number 1 priority and something we have built a solid reputation on over the last four years. Proactive customer service is essential to us, so Parcelhub is a natural fit. We are proud to have a 5* Trustpilot rating and believe many of our customers feel our customer service goes above and beyond to help them if there are ever any issues.

An evolving partnership with Parcelhub
Parcelhub is a long-term partner to help us keep offering our customers different delivery options at competitive prices for our customers. Our partnership already undertook a significant evolution in 2021, with a flexible approach to the multi-carrier system allowing us to utilise courier networks based on service levels during peak times.

The logistics market is undergoing a lot of change, so the flexibility and range of options Parcelhub offers will likely be crucial in the future.

As a general surplus food store, in the future, we would like to help further people access surplus food and make it normal for people

Learn more about award-winning Food Circle Supermarket
"There are lots of ways for people to learn more about us! More information on our website, foodcirclesupermarket.co.uk. We are very active on social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and TikTok), providing information about our products and behind-the-scenes insights.

"We (the founders) also create and host a podcast called Business Life, where we talk about our experiences in business and sometimes interview guests, who are usually contacts and connections we've made during our journey in the industry.

"We were winners of the 2018 Hallam Enterprise Award at Sheffield Hallam University, which opened the door for working more closely with the University and other educational institutions. Paul has been a guest speaker at Sheffield Hallam University's ScaleUp360 events and has recently started delivering seminars for business students at Sheffield College and schools in the Sheffield area."