85 India Hamilton – SCOOP – transforming local food systems

Catherine talks to India Hamilton, co-founder of circular economy food cooperative SCOOP.

We dig into the challenges of providing healthy, affordable and local food on a small island. We hear about the founding principles behind SCOOP and it’s ‘why’. India explains how SCOOP goes beyond the provision of local, healthy and sustainable food and is embedding circular solutions across the business.

We find out how SCOOP survived during lockdown, and discuss India’s counter-intuitive conclusions about the real meaning of convenience.

Podcast host Catherine Weetman is a circular economy business advisor, workshop facilitator, speaker and writer.  Her award-winning book: A Circular Economy Handbook: How to Build a More Resilient, Competitive and Sustainable Business includes lots of practical examples and tips on getting started.  Catherine founded Rethink Global in 2013, to help businesses use circular, sustainable approaches to build a better business (and a better world).

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Links we mention in the episode:

• A Circular Economy Handbook: How to Build a More Resilient, Competitive and Sustainable Business – buy from any good bookseller, or direct from the publisher Kogan Page, which ships worldwide (free shipping to UK and US) and you can use discount code CIRCL20 to get 20% off. It’s available in paperback, ebook and Kindle. If you buy it from online sources, make sure you choose the new edition with an orange cover!
• Sign up to get the podcast player and shownotes for each new episode emailed to your inbox

• India Hamilton on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/india-hamilton-53a15a76/

• SCOOP www.scoop.org.je 

• India’s own website bit.ly/tasteofcarbon

• Didi Pershouse – author, educator, and soil sponge strategist committed to building healthy communities both above and below ground. Founder of the Land and Leadership Initiative https://www.didipershouse.com

• Dr Christine Jones talking about the soil biome and how bacteria recognise each other https://fibershed.org/podcast/soil-to-soil-podcast-ep-7-why-soil-is-a-living-being-with-dr-christine-jones/

• Circular Economy Podcast Episode 58 Elis Joudalova – OLIO https://www.rethinkglobal.info/episode-58-elis-joudalova-olio/

• Slow Food UK https://www.slowfood.org.uk/

About India Hamilton

Co-Founder of SCOOP, India has worked on food businesses since 2012, and has an MA in Food and Development. She was Director of an award-winning social arts catering organisation for 3 years, where she fed over 26,000 people. She is currently a PGR at Glasgow University and has recently co-founded the community group Jersey Food Systems Lab.

India is a NED for Really Regenerative Centre and on the founding team of the Scotland Transition Lab. She is a regular author for QUOTA.media.

Interview Transcript

Provided by AI

Catherine Weetman  00:53

Hello, it’s episode 85. And thank you as always for listening. Today I’m talking to India Hamilton, co founder of SCOOP, a circular economy Food Cooperative on the island of Jersey, near the coast of Northwest France. Scoop – the Sustainable cooperative Limited is a zero waste shop that believes everyone on the island has a right to good food in the era, and I had a very enjoyable long conversation. And so I’ve decided to break it into two episodes, this episode 85 and a bonus episode that are released just afterwards. For this episode, I’ve included the main elements of our discussion about scoop. So we’ll hear about what scoop does and why and how it got started. How scoop goes beyond the provision of local healthy and sustainable food, and is embedding circular solutions across the business. For example, with packaging, we find out how the business survive during lockdown. And hear about India’s counterintuitive conclusions about the meaning of convenience. In the bonus episode, we talk about the context of scoop, including jerseys history, key crops and the challenges that raises for farmers. And how that’s informed scoops founding principles. We hear how India realised permaculture principles could unlock these challenges. The bonus episode also includes more on membership models and loyalty, the challenges of regulations for small businesses, and why India loves compliance officers. We discuss why it’s important to support your local economy and how exploitative capitalism is undermining that. So back to Episode 85. And the main conversation with India Hamilton about scoop. And I’ll catch up with you afterwards with my thoughts on our conversation.

India Hamilton  02:52

SCOOP is a essentially a food shop in a in Jersey, and it’s part of a community movement that believes that small scale, localised food economies are part of our future. We, a bunch of people met in 2017, and 18, all kind of sharing the same journey, which was this, this desire to find and eat and be a part of a food community within jersey. And it felt like it was really missing at a particular grassroots level. A lot of people had their different journeys into SCOOP and how it was created. And mine pacifically was from a position of a chef. I was part of a food project which was doing really well in Hyderabad, where I learnt about the food system and how the localised food system can play a role in supporting small scale agriculture or destroying small scale agriculture. So I was coming at it at a very technical level. And yeah, but 2018 We opened and we have nearly 250 members that partake in this move movement where we’re supplied by over his over the time, we’ve been supplied by 104 different producers locally. And we work with about a range of different farmers no matter how small they they are. Yeah.

Catherine Weetman  04:39

And are those producers there they’re all in Jersey?

India Hamilton  04:44

And well we we import from we build relationships from people who trade it’s not a part of ignoring trade. We we have to build a comprehensive service our mandates, but it’s all designed to build the market for the localise allow the local farmers who farm in who farm in relationship with the land, using ecological principles, focus on biodiversity. Who summer organic Association registered organic Association registered. But when you, you relate to farmers on a kind of context of a worldview, and the worldview is essentially ecological, and connected, and a part of the community. So that’s very much a part of the farming practices that we work with.

Catherine Weetman  05:48

So that’s what you’re mostly looking for. When you talk to the, you know, a new a new producer or trader to be part of the network, you’re looking to understand what their worldview is, and whether it aligns with the values of SCOOP and the and the community members. Is that my understanding?

India Hamilton  06:13

I think it just emerges, of a shared of shared values. It’s kind of strange. So as part of our research, it was a group of farmers who’ve been who’ve been quite kind of abused by the conditions of the market. They produce food in this very caring way for the planet, but the market really is dysfunctional for it. And as it over time, they’ve been quite marginalised, and feel quite dejected, by progress, I think. But I kind of sat back and thought, but that’s my favourite farming. And instead of telling them to change, can I tell the conditions of the market to change? And can I reshape how the market relates to these farmers, so they’re valued in it. And when I did my research around Sqoop, I was looking at kind of the food system in its entirety. And asking questions around how each part of the food systems interacts with doing better themselves, how they move forward to do better. And what was really interesting in that research was, everybody wants to do better, and have these most amazing, organic farmers be a part of the picture. But when you look at it, systemically, you realise that they’ve had loads of structural barriers to that excess.

Catherine Weetman  07:44

So that, so that kind of took you back to Jersey in 2017, then, and so how did you get off the ground? Then? What what, how did you bring people into this idea or what what came first?

India Hamilton  07:59

So I landed and I, and out of nowhere, I met Casper, Wimbley, and Susanna, who had started a agricultural laboratory artists residency programme in Jersey asking these questions, and it was called the morning boat. And they had like 500 applications from around the world. And they cherry picked some incredible ants artists to come over and create these really deep relationships and understandings and stories and visions basically, with different communities within Jazzy. And what was really nice about the artists coming in is they didn’t have the tensions and the the kind of the restrictions over what, what the narratives and Jersey they just saw things and thought they were great and got on with talking to them. And it was through that probe. It was through that programme that I met Casper, and Susanna. And it was through that, that they had found the shop that was empty. And they had decided to open the shop. And it just so happens that we met and then I had all the tools from India, from the hydropower project that could that could engineer they had insights into the work to projects that were happening in Jersey about new ways of looking at membership and community building. That’s very much their thing. And then I have this kind of structural kind of modelling approach of how to kind of run the business and understand the kind of systemic issues of the island that we needed to address. So that kind of and then there was other groups who were like, We want to help because we want to grow and we want to be a part of this And then a maths teacher who helped helped us with who helped us with understanding the accounts in a really creative math math, like creative way. So it just sort of it was a group of people that came together without expectation at one time, by coincidence, in a way,

Catherine Weetman  10:25

it reminds me of, of a saying I love, which is you set your mind in a direction and then fate steps into lendahand, you know, in terms of these serendipitous meetings with other people, and to find out that they have similar visions, and different skills, and so on. And you mentioned your maths teacher. And I’d like to find out more about the funding and commercial model. So perhaps you could explain a bit about how that works. So

India Hamilton  10:56

his name’s Andy, and he was given the task to, because we didn’t know what we were going to sell. So we couldn’t wait to Profit and Loss really. So he was under task to, to kind of ask the question, what is the tipping point of how many members of a community do we need to be functioning with us to be successful? And then from that, what are the what are the needs of those communities so we can reduce the financial barriers for certain for certain groups to be part of that journey. So he was tasked to kind of work this out. And he did it. And there’s and the strategy is in openness is a family or a household, roughly, by five to 8000 pounds worth of food a year, that’s probably quite a lot. We went, we thought we needed to build a relationship with one family, and aim for half of their yearly spent on food. So what does that mean? That’s fantastic. They that family, for us, rewarding them with a very tailored shop, they would provide us with a membership fee, which they pay up front, and then returned to that membership fee, they then get 25% of everything. So they so Andy had to work out how many families we needed to be working like that was a function and to open. And he said 150. And we have, we have a set, we basically markup everything 50% And then discount it 25% from everyone. So we’re making about less than half Pence in the pound products for the nominee for the members. And what we did was, we did a Crowdfunder, which wasn’t really crowding money, it was crowding crowds. And through that, we needed to find 150 People who have been willing, and we raised 25,000. through that. And though that money went back into the community through discounts over a period of three or four months. And so actually, they were willing to spend between we have a monthly fee is about between five pounds and 35 pounds a month, depending on your household. And if you’re on income support, okay. So he worked out that we needed 100 with people. And without going into debt. He calculated it. And at the end of the first year, we had turned over 320, which is roughly 50% 320,000, which is roughly 50% of the expenditure of those 150 people.

Catherine Weetman  14:02

Right?

India Hamilton  14:03

So it although, although in close analysis, it’s not as simple as that, but it was pretty much it was an equation that worked.

Catherine Weetman  14:16

So just to make sure I understand. So you have a group of members who get discounts who pay pay a membership fee, and they get discounts. And then you also sell to the general public who might come in once a year, once a month, or you know, once Yeah,

India Hamilton  14:36

so the more you are involved with is the kind of better value is when we did when we did a bit of research, research when we did the research. And one of the things that came up when we spoke to consumers with they’ll just if they don’t have much time they’ll pop to a supermarket. That’s because they’re quite conveniently placed the supermarkets and they will pick up just to get one thing that pick up everything. And often when it’s hotter, they’ll do that. And so without this kind of monthly fee that we were using to pay our bills, that decision made a big difference to, to big difference to a farm shop. And we kind of thought, Well, how do we make that behaviour not problematic to us. And this is when this membership fee was is has played an integral role, because it covers a lot about running costs. Yeah. So we wanted the, we wanted the people involved to be out, not feel guilty about just popping into the supermarket, but also in as always, to be there looking fresh and full each time that they came back. So it was really to tackle that issue.

Catherine Weetman  16:00

And coming back to how SCOOPs evolved over the last few years, you now offer a whole range of different services, including cleaning glass jars and bottles so they can be reused and helping people’s out helping transit packaging from companies get reused. Can you talk us through some of those experiments that you’ve launched and what’s worked and maybe maybe some that you struggled with?

India Hamilton  16:23

Yeah, so

India Hamilton  16:26

we are a we are circular economy business. Because you it’s about its productivity with a small p isn’t it, you’ve got to look at resources at every node of your system. So that’s what we are. We also are part of the kind of guided by this project called chef manifesto, which is the the practical use of this, all of the saleable development goals that have been synthesised in for food businesses. And one of their points is about upholding and teaching about compliance, and essentially environmental health and food safety as integral to sustainability. So what we kind of understand is that, again, sustainability is a process, it’s not a product. And we have designed our compliance and our strategies to be circular. So compliance, I think, from environmental health is quite a concern as a relatively boring job. But when you tie it to sustainability, and future modelling, it’s very exciting. So we sat down and wrote a 25 page document of compliance for all of our waste streams, and started to kind of imagine how to how to deal with them, and what things can we put in place. And one thing that came up with this, and it’s sort of called the SCOOP loop. So it’s kind of, that’s a policy framework. And lots and lots of different projects have come out of that, when you really open up this, there’s loads of things. There’s loads of processes that come out of that, but the key ones have been with packaging. So we have a glass glass bottle drop off site, last jar drop off site, it goes in, it gets cleaned. And then these this then gets used for jarring the processes that the products that we we make from surplus and from stuff that’s slightly missed it’s time on the shop. So that in itself is circular. So we create a whole bunch of products, but they they’re not products that are designed by recipes are designed by process. So we’ve got about 10 different products in the range from kimchi to soups to chilli sauces, but in the last year and a half, we’ve made 675 recipes, because everything different is coming in all the time. And through our so that environmental health officers like what, so we then got to go no, this is safe. And this is how we’re going to deal with this. And this is our policies is the practice. This is how people find the information. And so we use a barcode hashtag number for people to trace track and go digitalize the recipes and we use it wax so it can be cleaned. So we’ve kind of

Catherine Weetman  19:40

worked to seal the, the lid on or

India Hamilton  19:43

know to write the code on Okay, so it’s it’s it was an experiment in a circular system with lots of things in place that have had to be thought through at every stage. But it’s really work thing. And what we’ve worked out is that cleaning a glass jar and a tiffin box with a, you know, a reusable container is cost 40 per unit with an employment of, you know, with personnel involved. And if you go to the local traders to buy a sustainable container that Centrify per unit

Catherine Weetman  20:24

when lockdown happened, that pose challenges for SCOOP because it’s such a, you know, community based business and thrives on the, you know, the real face to face relationships and so on. And we talked about convenience. And, and you talked about the lack of convenience being the USP of SCOOP, which is kind of counterintuitive for most of us. So maybe you could unpack that a bit for us, you know, what happened in lockdown and what you decided was important.

India Hamilton  20:58

The well that’s it’s be