Who Is West Country Olives?
Firstly, I would just like to set the scene of West Country Olives.
We are a family run business based in Exeter, Devon. We are a small enterprise, but wow do we have a great team behind us, currently we have around 20 team members all in all. I am sure you’re probably thinking ‘that seems like a lot of employees for a business that has only just started’, and if that was the case, I would agree with you. But the thing is, we are not just West Country Olives, we are also Orchardlea Foods.
Orchardlea Foods is a food wholesale business that has stood the test of time, operational for over 25 years, we really do know good food when we see it. It was run for most of its life by Tim (one of our directors) before Liam (Tim’s son & our Managing Director) took it on back in 2013 leaving Tim with some more time to come up with ideas such as ‘West Country Olives’.
Where Did The Idea For West Country Olives Come From?
The idea for West Country Olives came to Tim (one of our Directors) at the end of 2019 and it has taken almost a year to bring the concept into being, everything seemed to be going well when we got to the start of the year, everyone was hopeful for a speedy turn around, I think we all thought we’d be up and running in a few months.
We placed an order for our packaging at the beginning of the year, a large order of 20,000 units, we were throwing everything into this new venture. I think you can probably guess what happened next, that’s right, coronavirus hit the nation, our olive dream was put on hold whilst we focused on keeping Orchardlea Foods running. We had some staff furloughs and a dramatic increase in business due to the high sales local shops were receiving, we were really stretched to keep up with demand. This meant hiring a few new employees to bolster our workforce.
Once we’d settled into this new high quantity of business, it was time to get back to our olives, but the packaging still hadn’t arrived… Our packaging company was going through its own struggle with coronavirus and they were months behind schedule.
What were we to do with no packaging?
We decided to push on and get everything else ready so that when the packaging did arrive, we were ready to start shipping out to customers straight away. That meant completing the design of the website, sorting out all our costings including our shipping fees and creating all our social media accounts so we were all ready to go.
Finally the packaging arrived after months of waiting and we were ready to launch.
This brings us to now, and West Country Olives is up & running, we have created a plethora of flavours that we are incredibly proud of, with more on the way! We cannot wait for you to get your teeth into them. The website is live, our ebay store is up and running with our amazon store in progress. Our existing wholesale customers have begun stocking their shelves, things are looking great for us now and we are all breathing a slight sigh of relief.
So What Now?
But now the real work begins and truthfully, we cannot wait for the challenge. We hope you are just as excited about this as we are.
We here at West Country Olives are now engaged in a passionate pursuit to produce the perfect olive and we will not relent until that goal is achieved.
If you love olives, this is where you need to be.
Thanks for reading.
William Price
West Country Olives