There was no business plan or mission statements, little experience and little money. We had just come back from Spain, Jessica was working in a Spanish/Italian restaurant and I was 'finishing' my PhD. Back then we kept the samples we were selling from in our fridge at home. It was all very far from corporate. The company was formed on the back of a passion for food, a love of Spain and a handfull
of contacts who were going to provide us with some fantastic products: mostly small, artisan producers in and around Jessicas's native León. After a scouting trip to Spain in April 2006, the first pallets began to arrive at our 35 sq. foot lock up in Shalford (near Guildford, UK), the first website went up and Jon swapped his Hyundai for a transit. We quickly moved from Shalford to Crawley where we installed our first cold room in a storage unit (perhaps the first and maybe the last to do so). Once that big white beast was up there wasn't much room for anything else, so we stocked up on chorizo and Manchego and little else. The web brought our first retail customers but space was tight, sales were slow and driving from Guildford to Crawley every day was tiring. In late 2006, thing started moving and Jess gave up her day-job. We found and moved to our own warehouse in Merrow (just outside Guildford), built a proper website, widened our range and started selling to wholesale customers. 2007 saw retail and trade shows, a Saturday market in Guildford, a redesigned website, as well as the welcome addition to the team of John Hickey, our friendly National Sales Manager. By early 2008, John and Jessi could cope no longer with the daily pick, pack and despatch as well as the administration and development of the company and the warehouse at Merrow was already looking small. Time to move on again. In July 2008 we joined forces with Eagle Express (courier, logistics and storage) and moved operations to their facility in Old Woking, providing us with three times more refrigerated storage space and a helping hand with the logistics. In March 2009, in search of more space and a wider range of delivery options for our customers, we moved our warehouse platform to Snetterton near Norwich. We now enjoy double the amount of refrigerated space in our purpose-built cold store and almost unlimited ambient storage, along with the services of Johnston Logistics UK, experts in getting our products from us to you! The website you're looking at now is part of our plan to expand the range of information we provide to our customers. A working day importing Spanish food brings a great deal of news, insight and interesting information that we would like to share with the UK Spanish food community - everything from recipes for great paella to explanations for the soaring price of saffron!
