04/01/2024
It’s with a heavy heart that we announce that Locavore Edinburgh will be closing. Our last day will be the 21st of January.
It’s two years since we opened on Dalry Road and over that time we’ve built up a fantastic amount of local support and regular customers thanks to our wonderful dedicated team. We want to thank you all for supporting the vision of what we were trying do to here on Dalry Road as part of our mission to support and build a sustainable local food system which is better for people and planet.
We tried to do something really ambitious by opening Scotland’s largest local, organic and zero waste supermarket in a 6,000sqft shop front. In hindsight we did this without enough money behind us, and at the absolute worst time we could have… we opened in January 2022 as the cost of living crisis began, energy prices soared, and the UK economy melted.
Fundamentally, our shop just has not been busy enough to support all the costs that come with running such a large operation. Our sales were much lower than we had hoped and despite growing support and our best efforts with very limited resources, we’ve just not been able to build custom to a sustainable level quick enough.
We’re sorry to everyone we let down and we’re grateful to everyone who helped us give it our best shot.
We did do some great things while we were here:
- Around 130,000 customers came through our tills, including many regulars again and again.
- We spent £1 million with local and organic supplies.
- We paid £310,000 in wages to our local team
- We supplied 8000L of organic milk from our milk vending machine
- We sold tons of local organic produce and helped people save countless single use plastic items.
- Our organic cafe fed people tens of thousands of nutritious lunches and hosted loads of events.
Although our Edinburgh shop is closing Locavore goes on so please support us by signing up for a veg box delivery, we deliver right across Edinburgh (https://vegbox.locavore.scot/). Also give your support to Edinburgh's other progressive shops who probably need your support too... New Leaf, The Refillery, Weigh To Go and Dig In to name a few.
Thanks again for all your support.
