We've been doing some number crunching for our veg box scheme. We've found some of the stats and guides on OOOOBY very useful.
"In November there were 67 hubs actively trading on Ooooby with combined sales of £740k. In round figures, that’s an average of £11k per hub per month, or £132k per year.
There were some large hubs in this mix with more than £100k in sales in November alone (£1.2M annually).
Most hubs, however, are small farms with teams of 2-3 people hustling part time, so the median monthly sales is more like £5.5k, or £66k per year.
Most of these small farms also sell to local businesses and at farmers markets bumping up their total income.
In terms of customer numbers, there were 11,500 households who ordered a total of 35,000 deliveries in November.
On average, that’s around 470 deliveries per hub per month and the median is around 235 deliveries.
The average order value per hub ranges from £7 to £37. The average order value across all hubs is £21.15 and the median is £17.83."
From the start up guide they give us this...
"Now, let’s take a look at some simple economics based on 100 customers with a £20 average weekly order value.
This will generate around £8,000 in revenue per month.
A gross margin of ~50% on fresh produce is fairly typical (much more than that if you grow it yourself) and around 25%-30% on pantry and chilled items such as bread, milk, eggs etc.
Assuming 80% of your sales are fresh produce and 20% are pantry or chilled, then the average gross margin is ~45%.
That’s £3,600 gross margin per month which pays for rent, cost of the boxes, printing for paperwork, van running costs and your labour.
This size operation can be handled by 1 person working hard full time or 2 - 3 people hustling part time.
This is your baseline from where you can work to increase your average order value by expanding your range and increase your customer numbers by increasing your marketing efforts or expanding your delivery zones."
For our scheme we are going to charge £18 for a weekly box and aim to sell 100 boxes a week - it's a subscription service so the aim is to win and then retain customers who are repeating the same order each week. From that each grower will get paid a standard flat rate for the number of items they contribute to the box. This is to keep it simple and fair and everyone is happy with that arrangement. Different people will pack boxes each week and get paid a flat rate for the number of boxes they pack. Every month we'll set aside an amount for administration, accounts, marketing etc. Any profit at the end will be used to grow the scheme..
The hope is that everyone involved will get a fair reward for their input.
The old adage is
'you keep the business for the first year, it keeps itself for the second & all being well it keeps you from the third year'.
There is some fantastic information from the OGA, well worth the membership alone.
https://organicgrowersalliance.co.uk/the-organic-grower/