News
News
TV veg ad encourages kids to #EatThemToDefeatThem
• The UK ranks 21 out of 28 in the EU for fresh vegetable consumption. (Euromonitor data) • 96% of teenagers and 80% of primary school age children don’t eat enough vegetables (Veg Facts – The Food Foundation) • 44% of children will remove at least some, if not all of the [...]
Market’s relationship with City Harvest helps to feed vulnerable Londoners
A relationship that started between New Spitalfields Market and the award-winning charity City Harvest London (CHL) last summer has already made a huge difference to some of the most vulnerable sections of London’s population. CHL is leading the way in recycling food for the better good and promoting greener [...]
Market supports local school’s International Evening
The market donated a tray of pineapples for Hackney’s Kingsmead Primary School to offer families at its annual International Evening, which was held on Thursday 15th November. “It’s such a treat to be able to offer our families some delicious healthy fruit,” said Emma de Sausmarez, Communications and Community [...]
Why doing the right thing should not be competitive
A programme started in October 2017 to tackle the issue of waste at New Spitalfields Market has paid huge dividends in its first year. Market superintendent Ben Milligan, who has headed up the process, said the project, which not only reduces waste, but also monetizes some of that waste to [...]
Industry can give growing veg movement added momentum
Quietly but surely, there seems to be a pretty significant veg movement emerging in the UK and it must be something to which wholesale markets can give their wholehearted support. On this site in recent months, we’ve featured The Food Foundations’ Veg Power campaign, which hopes to increase vegetable [...]
Lord Mayor makes annual pilgrimage to New Spitalfields
The Lord Mayor of London Charles Bowman made his annual visit to New Spitalfields Market last month and on a beautiful morning in sunny East London he, his sheriffs and other invited guests were given a guided tour of the site, followed by a traditional market breakfast. After eating, [...]
Why traditional wholesalers can operate outside the digital world
My French teacher at school loved an expression and one that has always stuck with me was “if you’ve got nothing interesting to say, say nothing”. Now, as I’ve been a journalist writing and talking about the fruit and vegetable industry for 20-odd years, there may be a few [...]
New Spitalfields spends a week in the spotlight
On Tuesday June 5, New Spitalfields was the sponsor of the Wholesale Supplier of the Year category at the 2018 FPC Fresh Awards, held at The Pavilion, Tower of London. During a fun-packed evening hosted by one of our fellow Eastenders, Shane Richie, The SMTA’s chairman Paul Walker presented the [...]
Oxford postgraduate students use market as benchmark
An international cohort of postgraduate students from Oxford Brookes University recently visited New Spitalfields Market on what has become an annual research project. The students are learning how to put urban policy into practice and each year they are set a project to regenerate a market in a different [...]
Paul Walker new Chairman of the SMTA
Paul Walker has been named the new Chairman of the Board of the Spitalfields Market Tenants Association (SMTA), as he and Chris Hutchinson swap roles on the board. Hutchinson, managing director of Arthur Hutchinson Ltd at the East London wholesale market, had been Chairman of the SMTA since 2004, [...]
Lewis veers from trite to contrite to righteous
When you hear that the head honcho of the country’s leading supermarket chain is to speak in front of an audience filled with food and drink suppliers, competitors and others with fairly entrenched views of his organisation, you don’t generally expect to hear anything that surprises you. There will inevitably [...]
New Spitalfields adjudged Britain’s best wholesale market
New Spitalfields was judged Best Wholesale Market 2018 at last week’s Great British Market Awards. The prestigious annual award, which was presented during a conference in Birmingham organised by the National Association of British Market Authorities (NABMA), recognises work and achievements at UK markets in 2017. It was given [...]
Obituary: Laurence Eldred – 1927-2017
Laurence Eldred, who had made his mark on Spitalfields Market over more than seven decades, died after a short illness earlier this month, having been taken ill on his 90th birthday. His son Martin provided us with the following tribute in memory of his father and we publish it with [...]
#VegPower advert launches important campaign
Thousands of people have come forward to be a part of a unique campaign launching today (January 18), to help increase consumption of vegetables across all ages and demographics throughout the UK. Work carried out by the campaign’s driving force – The Food Foundation – has ensured that the [...]
Supply is key to wholesale future
As another year draws to a close, many of us will be asking ourselves what we’ve learned from the last 12 months and how we can use those lessons to improve our lives both at work and at home in 2018. For anyone living and working in the UK, [...]
Veg campaign will benefit both trade and consumers
For as many years as I can remember, the fresh produce industry has lagged way behind its food and drink counterparts in the promotional stakes. For such an important sector, both in terms of feeding the nation and keeping them healthy, it’s bordering on tragic that so little of the [...]
Film 2017: A ‘Day’ in The Life of New Spitalfields
Welcome to the New Spitalfields market film premiere, which charts a day in the life of the UK’s premier fruit, veg and flower wholesale market. The eagle-eyed amongst you will note that there isn’t much of what we generally refer to as ‘day’ involved, but the working day [...]
Why are the multiples running scared of Brexit?
I’m sure I’m not the only one who is thoroughly fed up of the incessant doom-laden Brexit forecasts. As a journalist myself, it astonishes me that so much media space is given to so much conjecture. But I’m also left dumbfounded at the types of people who want to wade [...]
Can wholesalers continue to live on fringes of social network?
New Spitalfields Market has a good website and an active twitter feed – its handle is @FruitnVeg_Spits for those of you who aren’t amongst the 500+ followers. But looking at its content and the corresponding content for the twitter feeds of other wholesale markets, it’s not hard to conclude that [...]
Markets can never lose their community spirit
This is a bit of a generalisation, but as someone who was brought up outside London, one thing that has struck me about this city since I’ve lived here is the sense of community that we see and feel in adversity as opposed to the lack of any real sense [...]
Market hosts Lord Mayor’s annual visit, with no Lord Mayor!
Christmas comes but once a year, of course, and so does the visit of the Lord Mayor of the City of London to New Spitalfields (bear with me, it’s not as tenuous as you think!). Unfortunately, the 2017 visit coincided at late notice with the Official State Opening of [...]
Market remembers school bombing 100 years on
New Spitalfields Market donated fresh produce and a fruit basket to a commemorative event at a local East End school in Poplar on June 15. The photo above this article is of a newspaper article that appeared in a recent Daily Express about the bombing of the school 100 [...]
Three-pronged promotion for the market
It's fair to say we've had a busy three days promoting the market! On June 7th, several tenants attended the opening cocktail reception for the fourth annual London Produce Show and Conference, which attracts around 700 fresh produce and flower industry professionals to Grosvenor House on Park Lane. It's [...]
Take your face-to-face interaction outside the market
As wholesalers and catering suppliers, tenants at New Spitalfields may have seen a drop-off in the numbers of people actually visiting the market compared to their halcyon days. Deliveries have become a bigger part of the trade, but more than any other sector of the fruit, vegetable and flower supply [...]