Guy Singh-Watson: Riverford founder still digging for the future

theguardian.com:

Guy Singh-Watson has gone totally nuts. He’s striding through a field of saplings, lively spaniel Artichoke bounding around his feet, extolling the virtues and drawbacks of growing walnuts, hazelnuts and chestnuts.

At 61, and having sold a majority stake in his Riverford organic veg box business to employees four years ago, Singh-Watson could be forgiven for slowing down. Instead, the keen sailor and surfer has caught the next wave.

Some of his Riverford money has been invested in the nut trees, and he also has a composting project, to use biodegradable packaging and boxes from the company’s vegetable deliveries. He has converted outbuildings on his farm into space for small business startups. And he bought a small yacht, whose bow can be seen poking out of a barn.

Started in 1986 as experiment in growing organic vegetables on the family farm, Riverford began by supplying supermarkets. Tiring of that, in 1993 Singh-Watson started using an old Citroën to deliver the produce to about 30 friends.

During the pandemic, families across the country turned to home deliveries as a way to dodge the virus, and Riverford’s veg box sales soared to 85,000 a week at the peak in 2020, from about 50,000 at the start of that year. The demand propelled turnover to almost £110m in the year to May 2021, compared with £75.7m before the pandemic.

The company made a pretax profit of almost £12m (after a £1.5m loss the year before), Its workers received a profit share of £3,800 each, whatever their pay level, and £1.8m was ploughed into climate and biodiversity measures.

Singh-Watson, who added Singh to his name after his second marriage in 2014 to restaurateur Geetie Singh, says sales could have been higher had Riverford had more capacity. It is now