Words Miriam Carey

Farmdrop is a website, much like Ocado or Tesco, where you can do your weekly food shop for essentials – organic milk, bread, pasta, meat, wine – even kids’ snacks and baby food – and have them delivered straight to your door. However, the difference is they come direct from small farms, which takes out the need for a corporate middleman.

As someone who is strapped for time and looking to fill their cupboards with healthy food with a conscience with minimal effort, I ordered the Farmdrop essentials package – a bundle of meats, vegetables and store cupboard staples. For the £47 bundle I get sourdough, organic milk and butter, mature cheddar, eggs, fruits and vegetables, streaky bacon, an organic chicken, organic pasture-fed beef mince and English ham. For each product, I am told exactly which farm in the UK each was sourced from. My chicken came from Wood Green Farm in Devon, where chickens are allowed to roam on luscious pastures and forage for insects. My vegetable bundle came from Purton House Organics, an organic farm in Wiltshire run by a mother and daughter.

With my bundle I decided to make an old-fashioned Sunday roast and I can immediately tell the quality of the vegetables from their odd shapes, as opposed to the identical genetically modified supermarket varieties. They also need a good deal of scrubbing to clean off the dirt, telling me they’ve come straight from the ground. The organic chicken is stuffed with giblets – which I use to make stock – and it’s lovely knowing I am preparing a healthy chicken that was raised humanely with lots of sunlight and fresh air.

There are many benefits to using Farmdrop, one being the increased choice of items you would not necessarily expect to see at your local supermarket. Foraged plants, such as sea buckthorn berries, three cornered garlic, and dried chanterelle mushrooms, and specialised meat, such as whole mallard duck and wild venison, all feature on the website.

The prices are also reasonable – you would expect to pay the same for items of lesser quality in the supermarket. With Farmdrop the farmer also gets a better deal – a 75 percent share of the retail price. This positive method of food shopping could drastically shake up the way the UK food supply chain operates. It’s time to ditch the supermarkets for a more ethical way of food shopping.

Visit the Farmdrop website