Abel & Cole Cash In
by Bonnie Alter, London on 10.25.07
Abel & Cole was the first company to make home deliveries of organic fruit and vegetables in the the UK. Started in 1988 with £2,000 worth of travellers' cheques, Ken Abel began delivering boxes of farm-fresh organic vegetables to subscribers' front doors. The timing was perfect: people were getting interested in healthy eating and the provenance of their vegetables and wanted something better than what the supermarket could offer. Suddenly strange and ugly vegetables were showing up and recipes for kale and pak choi were frantically being exchanged amongst neighbours. Now they deliver to 48,000 households, with sales of £28 million.
Sounds profitable, so much so that they have now sold an estimated third of the business to a private equity firm allowing the company to expand its service across Britain and increase the range of products on offer. The deal values the company at about £35 million and as Mr Abel owns 75 per cent, he is likely to have landed a windfall of at least £7 million ($14M). As for whether taking investment from an industry known for its ruthlessness will change his company, Mr Abel says that dropping the core values makes no business sense. "It would be completely insane for anyone to invest in our business if they didn't get that," he says. "It would be like the Bodyshop scrapping the ban on testing on animals." :: Guardian
We shop from Abel & Cole in our house (not as regularly as we would like to admittedly) and there are two things that actually make a difference (apart from the obvious environmental one)
1) Everything they bring us is fresh and tastes as it supposed to be tasting. Tomatoes like tomatoes and not like cardboard.Much better
2) Their customer service is excellent. Faced with years of bored shop assistants and noisy super markets it's amazing to get a delivery from a driver whom you know by name and get a call from their customer service after to check if everything was ok and if you need anything else or if you have any ideas for their service.
In our house we think that it's not only the Green aspect that makes us buy from them but that they realised that only being Green is not enough.
I do wonder how many tonnes of waste paper their marketing team must be generating. we must get one of Abel and Cole's pieces of junk-mail through the door at least once a month.
Their proclaimed green credentials just don't add up - they have self-made "No Air Miles" logos up front on their leaflets and on buried at the bottom of their website FAQ they say they are importing from Israel . I've no problem with the politics, but trucking or shipping veg all the way from Israel or beyond is hardly good for the environment.
It's a clear case of just marketing a standard product rather than a company actually addressing the issues of production and distribution that matter. Ditch Abel and Cole and support your local farmers market - the veg may have only traveled 20 miles, not over 2000.