Our Story About us
In October 2015, we started delivering our first fruit and veg boxes 2 days a week from our award winning farmshop on Rochester High Street. Now over 6 years and 80,000 boxes later, we have our own dedicated packhouse and offices on Medway City Estate delivering premium boxes 5 days a week. Our vast experience and award winning customer service, ensure that our customers’ veg box experience is an outstanding one.
Austen’s of Rochester and Austen’s Premium are family run with a fantastic dedicated team of staff. We believe in supporting local small farms and food artisans and bringing the best Kent has to offer for everyone to enjoy. Whether our customers choose to visit our farmshop or have their food delivered instead, the provenance and quality of our fine foods is consistently high.
Recipes Our wonderful local farms and artisans offer more
Supporting local farms and artisan food producers is a core pillar of our philosophy in both of our businesses. Over the years we have built great relationships and friendships with the local food producers that supply us, many of them award winning themselves. We believe in buying at rates that are fair and sustainable for the farms and affordable for our customers, it’s a fine balance.
In return, a farm that doesn’t mass produce offers so much more than conventional supermarkets. This includes true provenance, low food miles and exceptionally high quality flavour and freshness. The locally grown produce in our veg boxes is normally picked the day before delivery and sometimes even at the crack of dawn on the day your box is delivered. You can’t get fresher that that!
#1 Variety
Seasonal produce tastes better
#2 Local farms
Strong focus on local produce
#3 Always fresh
From field to box
#4 Flexible
Ability to swop items
EAT LOCAL • LIVE BETTER The choice is yours
Veg boxes have become a massive industry with over £200 million spent each year in the UK and for a good reason. The desire for good healthy produce from a farm or independent local outlet just down the road is very much on the rise. Supporting local is now more important than ever, especially since covid started changing the way people shop.
Our two least favourite words are mass produced. Mass produced represents a bad deal in the long run for consumers who want to buy ethically. Increasing numbers have grown tired of tasteless and insipid supermarket fruit and vegetables that are mass produced and covered in ridiculous amounts of single use plastics.
Equally, many are realising that the big national veg box companies, some producing 20,000-30,000 boxes each week, are also providing produce that’s low grade and mass produced in order to satisfy the level of orders. Often dressed up as organic, customers are under the impression that they’re receiving produce that is grown without the use of chemicals – the big lie. Whether synthetic or natural, pesticides or herbicides are both still chemicals that are on your produce.
In addition, they are spending millions on advertising and questionable marketing each year is. This is unfortunately necessary because their customer burn rates are so high. Why? Because it’s impossible to consistently provide high quality control at that level, resulting in them continually having to top-up their somewhat often unhappy customer base to satisfy their shareholders profits.
So what’s the answer? Buy local of course and eliminate all these issues with the food you eat by using farms who grow naturally as much as possible. There are many small, local veg box companies doing a fantastic job. We implore you to keep the movement going to buy local.
Thank you,
Andy Austen, Founder