Case Studies
Sussex Grazed
Key Facts
East Sussex | |
Established in | January 2023 |
Sussex Grazed is a project of Brighton and Hove Food Partnership | |
Company type | Community Interest Company |
N° of employees | One part-time manager and two volunteers per order cycle |
The project
How it works for the farmers
How it works for the shoppers
What works well?
What has been difficult?
What would you do differently
What is needed to make it work at a larger scale?
Tips for anyone wanting to replicate this project
Documents prepared for this work
Why the Open Food Network?
The Project
- Pilots an alternative route to market for small-scale livestock farmers and deer stalkers
- Enables farmers to take orders for meat before the animals go for slaughter
- Builds direct links between shoppers/buyers and livestock farmers
“We think this is a replicable model for farmers and deer stalkers to take on, without us as a third party. We have a vision of a network of Sussex Grazed farmers all selling their own shares at different times, direct from the farm. This can be made possible with the incredible support of the OFN platform and an engaged local community of regenerative, conservation grazing farmers.” – Laura Hockenhull, Brighton and Hove Food Partnership
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Sussex Grazed is a pilot project run by the Brighton and Hove Food Partnership. It is part of a larger four-year project which will run until March 2026 called Changing Chalk which is led by the National Trust and funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund. Changing Chalk is made up of 10 partners and 18 projects all focussed on the very rare and fragmented chalk grasslands of the Sussex Downs, which can be very biodiverse when carefully managed with appropriate livestock grazing.
Other Changing Chalk project partners include Sussex Wildlife Trust, the South Downs National Park Authority, Buglife, and Brighton and Hove City Council. These partners want to restore these rare grasslands by working with farmers whilst also connecting people to the land – much of which is working farmland.
The big selling point for Sussex Grazed is that we are offering meat boxes from conservation grazing animals with all the health and ethical benefits this brings to shoppers.
Sussex Grazed project was inspired by a CSA project called Sheep Share which offered quarter lamb boxes from the Brighton and Hove Council grazier, distributed from a house in Brighton. This project came to an end when the Tottingworth abattoir closed, as the next nearest alternative abattoir in Henfield was too far away.
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Photo credit for all images in this case study: Brighton and Hove Food Partnership
How it works for the farmers
Sussex Grazed works on a pre-order basis. The project brings together a group of farmers who supply our meat. We agree how many animals we are going to buy from each farmer, the date on which they will be ready and their expected weight and then book them into the DTM abattoir. The farmer delivers them to the abattoir then the abattoir delivers to the butcher. We collect the meat from the butcher where the cuts have all been vac-packed and bring them back to the distribution point at the Brighton and Hove Food Partnership clubhouse just outside Brighton where we pack them up into cardboard boxes. Quarter boxes include half a shoulder, half a leg, chops, rump steak, mince and cutlets. We keep the boxes in a commercial meat fridge until the customers collect them from the clubhouse.
Here is a quote from one of the farmers working with Sussex Grazed:
![IMG_1741](https://about.openfoodnetwork.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/IMG_1741-scaled.jpg)
“The option to supply Sussex Grazed was an exciting opportunity for multiple reasons:
- Small businesses working together can achieve big things, I think the range of businesses supplying Sussex Grazed compliment each other, as well as widening each other’s reach. I’ve redirected customers looking to buy meat, whilst I’m sure we’ve gained extra interest and engagement through Sussex Grazed followers.
- Supplying Sussex Grazed widens our reach to sell our product locally. We’ve always sold meat to local customers, but without putting a lot of time and effort into promoting it, we struggled to get to customers in more urban markets. If we had interest in doing more local sales we would.
- We’re in no doubt that producing food for local customers is essential, and I think Sussex Grazed aligns with those beliefs that we need to do more to educate local communities about the fact that farming, food production and nature on the South Downs are all interlinked. There’s no better way to get that message across than being able to associate a beautiful meal with what’s going on in the local area around you.”
– Ed Brown, Clapham Farm, Litlington
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How it works for the shoppers
![IMG-20230327-WA0020](https://about.openfoodnetwork.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/IMG-20230327-WA0020.jpg)
The customers are notified by email with as much notice as possible to maximise the time for promotion and planning. This can be anything between four and eight weeks before the pick-up date. The email includes the link to the Open Food Network shopfront where they can see the details of the lamb and/or beef boxes that are available and details of the collection date, time and place. Sometimes we have more than one order cycle running in parallel. We also have social media channels shared with other Changing Chalk partners who also promote our boxes.
The professional chefs who offer cookery classes in our community kitchens use Sussex Grazed meat in their classes and also promote our meat boxes. Similarly the South Downs National Park promotes us in their newsletter, and we were featured in a double page spread in the Friends of the South Downs magazine. We recently ran a competition with Restaurants Brighton.
Part of the problem with marketing across the whole Changing Chalk network is that our Food Partnership network is fairly Brighton Centric but Changing Chalk covers a large geographical area (Shoreham to Eastbourne). We would like to extend the marketing of our meat across the whole of this area but that would require either additional appropriate packing points or a refrigerated van to transport the meat to pick-up points and/or home delivery. The cost of these additions is prohibitive.
We are starting to experiment with Zedify for cargo bike deliveries in Brighton. In future, we may consider national courier options with wool cool boxes. Having said that, much of the appeal of this project is its local branding. It is possible that the National Trust, other National Parks and local Councils could support similar initiatives in other parts of the country with a focus on conservation grazed branding.
Our standard offering is that customers can order quarter animals. We have been experimenting with half boxes (half animals) for goats because they butcher better. Occasionally we will offer a whole carcass which can be collected directly from the butcher. Whole carcasses are done as a special arrangement for an individual customer who we will tag so that they are the only one who is able to see the whole carcass product on our shopfront.
We used to sell offal as an option to supplement boxes but occasionally the offal does not turn up from the abattoir. As a result, we now do not advertise in advance that we have offal to include in the boxes but if it does arrive from the abattoir we will freeze it and sell it on a later order cycle.
We are exploring selling individual cuts to make the scheme more accessible to those who may not be able to commit to a whole box. Our priority is boxes because the model is based on minimal waste and we therefore don’t tend to have extra animals left over in the freezer. However we are aware that not everyone is able to afford a box, and want to engage as many citizens as possible in this way of eating. This is a nice thing to be able to do but it is time consuming to price in line with the market rates and account for the varying £/kg across prime and low value cuts.
We are considering the idea of selling a ‘Chef Share’ to local restaurants. This will be easier if/when we have a van or other distribution system set up.
We did this customer survey in April 2024 to help us consider the demographic of our customers and assess how we might promote the scheme to a more diverse range of people, whilst valuing our existing customer base:
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What works well?
- The farmers like the model as they do not have to;
- do the marketing
- deal with the public
- deal with the butcher. They just have to deliver the animals to the abattoir
This has reassured us that there is an appetite amongst farmers and want this alternative model to work;
“More than ever it is important to connect people with the provenance of their food. Sussex Grazed has made this possible by marketing the produce and facilitating the huge amount of work behind the scenes to make this happen as smoothly as possible.” – Roly Puzey, Saddlescombe Farm.
- It is much easier than most farmers think it is going to be. There is so much red tape with the FSA but as a food business operator there is very little administration – you just need very clear operating procedures which need to cover:
- Keeping record of meat temperature for storage and transportation,
- Ensuring location is clean and food safe,
- Correct labelling
- Meat is traceable back to the farm and processor
- See our resource pack for more detail
- Customers like having a more direct relationship with the farmers
- Because the meat is pre-ordered and pre-paid for it can be distributed fresh at a better price than frozen.
- If we can scale it up, it will give farmers another route to market rather than relying on the current mainstream meat distribution system
- Animals which do not meet restrictive specifications required by the mainstream system can be sold through this model. Examples include animals that have been conservation grazed or are a rare breed and are therefore smaller.
- Occasionally when everything is boxed up at the end of an order cycle we end up with some pieces that are left over and are not needed in the boxes. This often includes offal. Any pieces like this will be frozen and then added to a future order cycle so that people can order these as separate frozen items when ordering fresh boxes
- We worked with Plumpton College to assist students with a pilot meat box scheme making use of the local abattoir and the college’s state of the art butchery unit to process college farm animals for sale to students and local residents. We engaged students with the idea of selling animals, grazed on their site, at their Estate Farmer’s Market. This included a discussion about the motivations behind fostering a more localised food system as well as demonstrating to students how to box up the different cuts ahead of a share.
“I’m delighted that we have taken this next step… there is so much potential to achieve more” – Jeremy Kerswell, Principal, Plumpton College
- Pricing. We are able to cover all the costs and still not undercut the mainstream meat distribution system. Our pricing model covers:
- Price to the farmer for the animal
- Abattoir costs (slaughter and delivery)
- Butchery costs
- Packaging
- A 15-20% mark-up that goes back into the project
- Time commitment. Each order cycle takes about 30 hours of management time. This covers
- 1 day pre-share including liaison with supplier, setting up OFN profile & online share information.
- 1 day for share preparation, packing reports, emails & general admin
- 1 day – collecting meat from butcher, boxing up the share, distributing share and hosting meat collection from the hub. Beef takes longer than lamb! This is based on 1 heifer or 16-24 lamb boxes. We have volunteers who take on this work in return for a 10% reduction in the cost of a meat box.
- 2 days marketing – social posts, newsletter content, external comms, print-based marketing, redesign of Sussex Grazed posters and merchandise.
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We have an OFN integration with Airtable which allows us to take the order information from OFN and calculate the profit we make on each order cycle.
We download customer details from OFN and then use Brevo for sending out newsletter and emails to customers. We used to use HubSpot but Brevo worked out cheaper.
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What has been difficult?
- Selling the boxes in advance of slaughter based on a predicted weight which may not be reached by the time we receive the meat from the butcher.
- Dealing with animals of different weights. Some lambs come in at 22kg whilst others from the same batch are 27kg.
What would you do differently if you were to do it again?
- Make sure that we spread out our order cycles over the year so that there are not two parallel order cycles selling very similar products at the same time.
- Include wild venison. We have recently started collaborating with Ben Marks at The Deer Project to develop a (quarter) venison ‘Browsing Box’. Ben is an independent Deer Stalker who shoots seasonal wild deer and butchers them in his own facility into gourmet cuts, bbq packs and processes his own sausages and burgers. This video helps promote the environmental, welfare and health benefits of venison production.
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What is needed to make it work at a larger scale?
- Better local abattoir infrastructure. Our one remaining local abattoir is threatened with closure when its lease runs out in seven years. Its equipment is very out-dated and too small for the level of demand it is coping with. It will take three years and 7-figure investment to build a new abattoir.
- More young people coming into abattoir and farming work.
- More farmers to commit to using this direct system. Not necessarily all of their animals; but maybe 20% through a local box scheme like this and the rest through the mainstream system.
- Electric refrigerated vans to deliver meat to customers
- A cohesive, accessible transport infrastructure to provide reliable movement of animals from farm to abattoir to butchers
- A system that would allow us to print labels with the exact weight and price of individual cuts so that we could use the Open Food Network joint pricing system to price and sell separate pieces independently of boxes. This would need to be a second stage of the meat box sales system because we can’t have the individual cuts priced when they are sold by the quarter. It would be a new model where we can weigh and label the ‘extra cuts’ post share and then freeze them for future sale.
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Tips for anyone wanting to replicate this project
- It is much easier than most farmers think it is going to be.
- Make sure you research your local area and build good relationships with the people who are already established. Where are the abattoirs? Who are the farmers and butchers? What meat sales systems are already in place? What transport networks can you tap into? Where will be your secure refrigeration storage?
- Follow guidelines on setting up a food business. Do your food safety certificates
- Work out your unique selling point. Get your marketing right
![Sheep on Sussex Downs_BHFP](https://about.openfoodnetwork.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/Sheep-on-Sussex-Downs_BHFP-scaled.jpg)
These are some of the documents we have prepared for this work
- Farmer introductory pack: Conservation Grazing: New Routes to Market which includes information on:
- How to join Sussex Grazed as farmer supplier
- Basic guidance on setting up a food business
- How to sell your produce through the Open Food Network sales platform
- Email templates
- Farmer credentials survey
- Ethical and environmental standards
- Operating procedures
- Set up guide for the Open Food Network
- To-do lists
- Marketing schedules
Many of these documents were adapted from work done and offered by other Open Food Network hubs (particularly Galloway Food Hub)
This is our Sussex Grazed producer network so far with details of each farmer
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Why the Open Food Network?
We chose the Open Food Network because we wanted a platform that allowed us to set up customised order cycles. Many of our farmers only have meat available irregularly. Also different farmers are able to give us different amounts of notice for when the meat will be available. The Open Food Network allows us to vary the duration of the order cycles. Other box scheme platforms that we looked at did not seem to be designed for meat.
The Open Food Network is a good fit for Sussex Grazed because:
“we wanted to work with a platform that matched our principles and ethics in terms of the food system we want to build locally. The OFN seemed genuinely engaged with sustainable food on a very local and human level. Some of the other leading e-commerce platforms felt a bit more removed”. – Laura Hockenhull, Brighton and Hove Food Partnership
We were also drawn to the fact that we could set up Sussex Grazed on the Open Food Network at no cost to us. This meant that it was very easy for us to have a go. Most farmers do not have the time or the money to set a website but they can easily set up a profile on the Open Food Network at no cost.
We use the OFN voucher system but would like this to be improved so that we can set vouchers up as time-limited or single use vouchers so that we don’t have to remember to take the voucher down to stop it being used multiple times. Our main use of vouchers is for volunteers who we offer a 10% reduction on boxes if they help with the boxing up.
Now that we have a following of customers we would like to use the Open Food network system to set up subscriptions so that shoppers can either pay a regular amount each month and receive an annual meat box and/or that subscription customers have priority over meat boxes and receive an order notification email when their preferred order cycle opens with the option to cancel the order if they don’t want it. In addition to ad hoc order cycles that would be triggered by the rearing cycles of our farmers, we are planning four distinct order cycles that will happen at the same time every year which we can hang the subscription system on.
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Funding
Sussex Grazed is part of the Changing Chalk project. Changing Chalk is a partnership of organisations working together for the future of the South Downs. Through this project, we are reversing the decline of the fragile chalk grassland, and connecting local communities to the nationally significant landscape on their doorstep. Led by the National Trust, the partnership connects nature, people and heritage, and is supported by the National Lottery Heritage Fund and People’s Postcode Lottery. It is restoring lost landscapes and habitats, bringing history to life and offering new experiences in the outdoors.
The Land Use Plus project (funded by the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation) is supporting Sussex Grazed, working strategically to improve food production practices that impact on nature recovery and climate change.Through Land Use Plus, we have been able to explore local meat infrastructure and issues such as lack of abattoir provision. It has also facilitated the inclusion of a venison ‘Browsing Box’ because of the environmental implications of deer populations in Sussex. The project also offers opportunities for farmer led training, food and farming events and conservation grazing research.
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