SF-October-2020

Christmas chutney and Boxing Day chutney which are more exciting, and nice as a gift. You can buy orange marmalade all year round, but Christmas chutney with cranberries is a bit more special.” “Our biggest sellers at Christmas are sparkling wines and Champagnes,” says Francesca Contini, “as people like fizz at Christmas, but it’s also our beautiful panettone, which we have made specially for us just outside of Milan – they come in lovely decorative boxes.” 4 Keeping shopping safe With restrictions in place to protect staff and customers, it’s important to be confident and organised in order to provide a positive experience in-store. “With social distancing and all that it’s going to be difficult for us to keep that level of service up,” says Stephen Fleming. Victoria Ketcher agrees. “We are currently rearranging the shop to make sure people can get in and out easily, and of course we’re going to have less people in the shop than we normally would at Christmas. We need to put processes in place to sort that but we still want to be able to give everybody the space to shop. We are aware that we’re going to lose a lot of the browsing space where people would usually pick things up, so we are rearranging the space to account for that and to allow people to pick things up quickly. We have to balance that out with not encouraging people to linger too much, though! We are also increasing our queueing points as we are aware that we need to make queuing at the tills as safe as possible. We’ve also not been able to do some of the seasonal things we usually do, like Santa, unfortunately, because we can’t deliver some of those events safely.” 5 Creating a festive ambience “What we’ve done in the past and we’re going to do again is have special evenings, so we’ve had a tapas evening and other evenings themed around Christmas, so it’s an Italian Christmas, or a French Christmas when we do a bouche noel,”’ says Tennenbaum. “It’s going to be an interesting one this year as we’re still a takeaway and we’re finding it’s still working given the uncertainty. What we might do is the same specialty dinners but as a box, so we prepare it all for them. It’s just another way that we can 17 do something differently from the markets and department stores who have all the usual brands.” “Playing music is also good for morale and creating ambience,” she continues. “We try to find different music for example French Christmas signs, Latin Christmas songs – just not the same songs you hear in every shop!” She also stresses the importance of staff morale. “I guess the other thing is to get the staff involved because it really helps people work harder, especially if they’re able to be given a creative challenge. We also get them to help decorate – where the baubles and lights and so on will go – and it works, joint decision making. The young ones always come up with some great ideas.” Ultimately, it’s important to remember that this Christmas is going to be different, says Francesca Contini. “I think this year is going to be a poignant Christmas, and it’s going to be a lot more about spending time with family. People are just happy they’ve made it through the year and they’ll be celebrating that.” Getting staff involved helps people work harder, especially if they’re given a creative challenge specialityfoodmagazine.com CHRISTMAS 2020 our website to make it as attractive and easy to use as possible with product descriptions and suggestions for cheese matching and pairings and so on. You need really detailed descriptions so people knowwhat they’re buying, and nice lighthearted suggested pairings. Really good photography is also something which will help them to spend their money. I would say it’s an investment. Thankfully we are able to do a lot of that in-house. We are also launching a newwebsite in the next couple of weeks with a new product range which – an increase of about 500% – and we’re going to incorporate click and collect into that so customers don’t need to buy in- store. Where usually we do Christmas ordering with paper order forms, this year is going to be all digital.” 3 Making the most of decorative packaging “We do a lot of hampers at Christmas time,” says Victoria Ketcher, “which tick the box in terms of packaging. We have a lot of hampers: seasonal ones such as cheese and pickle, best sellers from the shop, a gin hamper, a relax hamper with hot chocolate, socks and so on, and we’ve got the Award Winning Hamper which contains all our products which have won Great Taste Awards. We’ve tried to get evenmore creative this year, to try and expand the range a bit more. We also offer a DIY hamper so you can buy the hamper tray then you can choose your own products and make your own. We also make bespoke hampers so if you did want to make something different we do that as well.” “We have eye catching old- fashioned-American green and white squared paper, which we use in all kinds of ways,” says Tracey Tannenbaum. “We have stickers and order bigger sheets to wrap things, plus we put it in the windowwith our special local chutneys. We have VALVONA & CROLLA COLD BATH DELI