Metfield Stores
SAVE ON FUEL and SUPPORT YOUR VILLAGE STORE
If you value your village store we need you to shop there regularly.
We would be happy to take your regular orders for Metfield Bakery bread and cakes and Olde Barn Bakery bread. Also available to order are frozen pork cuts, sausages and burgers from Metfied Pig Herd, frozen rare breed pork sausages and bacon from Thorpe Hall Farm and fresh meat from Clarke's at Bramfield. Bulk orders of Suma products by arrangement. Please ask at the Stores or email for further details/price lists.
Don't forget we also sell greetings cards, pet and wild bird food and bird feeders. Fresh meat is delivered every Friday and fresh bread daily. New to the Stores are chilled soups from Village Kitchen which you can have heated up the shop or take home for later.
Delicious Village Kitchen cakes (e.g. fruit cakes, bread pudding, eccles cakes etc.) and soup, sandwiches, rolls and other savouries available daily. Orders taken.
From shop website
Metfield Stores community shop offers model solution
Metfield Stores in the village of Metfield, is enjoying a very promising reincarnation as a community shop. It has recently become one of the first Community Interest Companies (CIC) to be formed in Suffolk, and Suffolk ACRE’s Social Enterprise team gave advice during the development of the project.
The beauty of a CIC is that it is run by the community for the community. It can offer shares in the business to raise money, but the interest paid to shareholders is capped at 5% above base rate with the remaining profit being ploughed back into the business. All shareholders have the right to vote on issues relating to the running of the enterprise. Metfield Stores has successfully encouraged villagers to buy shares at £1 each and has thus far raised £12,000 for the CIC. In addition to supplying everyday commodities, the shop is championing local food producers, starting with the launch of the Metfield Frisky sausage, made with meat produced at nearby Thorpe Hall Farm, owned and farmed by 2006 Suffolk Show prize winner Peter Mortimer. Organic vegetables come from nearby Wakelyns farm, deli delicacies from Cleveleys at All Saints, Fixton mushrooms, daily sausage rolls and quiches from Pinky’s and of course, the famous Metfield Bakery bread (the company has moved across the Waveney to Norfolk).
The shop serves a wide catchment area, principally villages sandwiched between Halesworth, Harleston and Framlingham, many of which have over time lost their village shops to trend of supermarkets. When the original shop closed down at the end of 2005, there were fears that Metfield would go the way of it’s surrounding villages and lose its shop forever. A group of villagers came together with the aim of promoting a community buy-out of the shop, but at a public meeting no consensus could be reached how to do it. Then, at the eleventh hour, with the shop building going up for auction, local resident Rachel Kellett volunteered to try and buy the building if the community could put it in order and run it as a community shop. This suggestion was greeted with enthusiasm by a core group in the community including Martin and Ann Wolfe, Caroline Biggins and Bridget Morley who have done much to inspire this project and redevelop the shop. ‘We couldn’t lose: If the shop didn’t work, we had at least given it a go; if it did work, many options were open: it could continue to run as a community shop or be sold as a sustainable business - in any event the shop could be saved,” said Rachel.
At the time of the auction, Rachel was travelling on a train between Goa and Mumbai in India, listening live on her mobile phone to the auction taking place in Beccles. Just as the auction was reaching its climax the train entered a tunnel and she lost the connection. It was not until some hours later that she learned she had successfully bought the shop at the guide price of £180,000.
Six months later, when Rachel returned to England on the very day the shop opened its doors, she found it had been transformed. The shop had been gutted, re-floored, re-ceilinged, re-wired, painted inside and out, and re-stocked.
“It surprised us all, I think, the amount of diverse skills that existed in the village, and the enormous generosity of so many in this small community of 400 people, who consistently gave both practical and financial help. It is a testament to this generosity of spirit that the shop is open at all,” she said. “Retired builder, Gorden Lee, came out of retirement and whistled his way through stripping out, rebuilding and refitting the shop; professional sign painters emerged; people welding paint brushes turned up; classy London designers talked colour; and Bridget Morley worked miracles,” said Rachel.”
A Steering Group and Directors, Martin Wolfe and Alan Strevens, worked away behind the scenes, getting the business side of the project up and running, forming a limited company, applying for grants and investigating stock suppliers. The costs of the renovations were met by the CIC share capital plus £7,000 invested by Rachel as Landlord, together with a very welcome grant of £5000 from the Suffolk Village Shops Group. Liz Anderson of the support group ViRSA also gave welcome advice and put Metfield in contact with Rattlesden Community Shop which donated a free chiller counter - vital for the popular new deli counter.
One of the keys to the success is the 47 diverse volunteers who staff the shop. They come not only from Metfield but from the environs, working four-hour or six-hour shifts.
Comments include: “Once you’ve served behind the counter, shopping for yourself isn’t the same - you notice things you’d never noticed before, not only the price but where it comes from. And you get a till-skill appreciation!”
‘When you live outside the village, it’s stimulating to meet so many different people.”
“People coming in are all enthusiastic about the community element of the shop, asking questions, saying, ‘Best of luck: we lost our shop and we miss it”.
“Everyone is so patient realising that you are not an expert!” said Barbara Vidoen a volunteer.
“I haven’t been to a supermarket since the shop opened” said Suzie Harris.
‘I shop completely differently now. Instead of making a list of what I think I want, I go to the shop and see what’s there’ said a local volunteer-cum-shopper. The volunteers are skilfully trained in till, retail and stock management by Janet Rusted, the shop manager. At present she is the only one paid, however it is one of the shop’s objectives to pay more people as the business grows. Of course, she puts in far more hours than she imagined, and she admits that her other work as a gardener has been put on a back burner. But she thoroughly enjoys running the shop:
“It can be quite a challenge organising a rota of 47 volunteers!” said Janet. She is the daughter-in-law of Hedley Rusted who ran the last butcher’s shop that existed in the village (closed when Budgens opened in Harleston), and in whose honour the Metfield Frisky sausage has been named. Jan is supported by her partner Peter Twiss (also co-ordinating and driving the community bus) who gives a lot of free hours organising the newspapers and Magazines for Metfield Stores. Rachel said sales for the first month had substantially exceeded expectations predicted by ViRSA.
“If this level of sales continues it will yield a substantially higher turnover that will comfortably cover operating costs, and hopefully we will be able to employ more people from the village. The Stores not only feeds the needs of Metfield and the surrounding villages, but it has generated a great deal of energy and communication in the village.”
Article from Suffolk Scene produced by Suffolk Acre, Bulletin 36, summer 2006
http://www.suffolkacre.org.uk/Suffolk%20Scene%20Summer%202006.pdf