Jolly good show.

(From Off Licence News)

The prize for best diversification at the Countryside Alliance's Rural Retailer of the Year awards went to a deli this year. And a pub. No, it wasn' a tie; they're one and the same business - the Jolly Farmers, in Buckland, Surrey. Licensee Paula Briscoe and her husband, Jon, took on the pub as a franchise from pub company Mitchells & Butler in 2005 and turned one end into a modern deli and farm shop focusing on locally-sourced products, including English wines, bottle-conditioned beers, cider and soft drinks.

All are displayed in the shop bit of the pub, with laminated posters providing background on the producers, including the food miles from source to shelf. The deli contributed around 10% of the AGBP900,000 turnover in 2006/7.

Paula Briscoe explains how the set-up works.

Why not have more seating for diners and stick to the basics of pub retailing? It was two years ago when we identified a gap in the market where after 5.30pm you couldn' go in a shop locally. Secondly, we forecast that the smoking ban was going to come in because Ireland had gone that way and it was inevitable it would happen in the UK and could bring about a downtrend in pub trade . We'd also always just wanted to have a farm shop and deli, but weren' from a farming background. We had the space and this gave us a way of doing it. How has it worked out for you? It's worked really well. You don' make high margins in the shop compared with the pub because it's just the same as the high street, but it gives people a different reason to come and visit the pub. We get people from 9.30am all through the day, even up until 10pm buying bottled beer or wine.

Were you influenced by the long-term trend from on-trade to off-trade? Definitely, and the main reason we went for a deli and farm shop style, and the products we've got in there, is because there are a lot of local breweries and vineyards, as well as other food producers, that people just don' know about. A lot of the smaller brewers have been around for some time but people don' realise they're on the doorstep.

How does your supplier base differ between the two sides of the business? We use Hog's Back on the bar and Harveys, but in the deli we have WJ King, Hepworth's, Hog's Back and a cider company called Mr Whitehead's, which is actually down in Hampshire. When we first started, there weren' many local suppliers who would support us because they have minimum orders and want cash on delivery. We didn' want to tie up lots of money in stock if the idea wasn' going to work. Whitehead's was one of the ones that supported us. We've got nationally available premium soft drinks such as Frobisher's and Fentimans, but we also have Godstone apple juice and pear juice which is made up the ...