Food & Drink

‘Our view of food is warped’: Manchester grocer takes fight for healthy eating online

A new online grocery retailer has joined forces with local food and drink suppliers to help provide Mancunians with more honest and healthy food.

Bearfaced Groceries is aiming to give North West residents an alternative to the ‘big six’ major supermarkets by beating them on quality, freshness, shelf-life and price.

The Trafford-based company have teamed up with a plethora of local grocers and farmers, including Creamline Dairies who have been delivering milk to the Greater Manchester region for 70 years, to provide customers with the freshest food and drink possible, delivered straight to their door.

The service was launched by Philip Edge, who claims that many consumers are fed up with supermarkets putting profit before customer satisfaction and service.

“Our view of food these days has become so warped and it shouldn’t be,” he told MM.

“People to a certain extent don’t realise what goes into their food. It’s all quite secretive with the big food companies.

“They undertake their own research to tell you that the additives that go into their food is OK for you when in reality that isn’t the case.

“The supermarkets are all facing a big price-war and are all in decline with sales. They’ve got shareholders to please and have to maintain a profit so the loser ends up being the consumer who gets more sugar, salts and rubbish put in their food.

“As a nation we are unhealthier than we have ever been.”

Another aim of the business is to tackle food waste issues which according to Global Food sees a third of all food on the planet discarded each year and 30% of UK vegetable crops rejected by retailers due to aesthetic imperfections – something which Bearfaced wishes to address.

“Everything we do is bought to order so we have relatively little waste anyway but sometimes if you order crates of food then there is a case where there may be leftovers,” explained Mr Edge.

“We’ve teamed up with local charities and food banks who are going to give that food to homeless people.

“The ingredients and produce available from us comes in many different shapes and sizes as that’s the way it grows.”

As well as being the portal for customers to place their orders, the company’s website also displays healthy recipes devised by nutritionists, with an option to add all the ingredients from that recipe to the basket.

Bearfaced aim to expand their service nationwide in the near future, but Mr Edge insists that they must never lose their ambition of highlighting the importance of buying food from the source and supporting UK businesses.

“The North West is home to lots of very good producers and is possibly better than most other regions in the country so we see ourselves being focussed on the North West and Manchester area for a long time,” he said.

“We need to keep our values which are producing real food from real people.

“No matter how big the business gets hopefully we will always that independent message of the importance of real food and buying British produce when we can.”

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