As part of WACA’s Learning Visits programme, we’re connecting with established community businesses to gather practical insights and lessons learned. These visits help us understand different models of community ownership and operation, providing valuable guidance as we develop our own local initiatives. Each visit offers a unique perspective on what makes community enterprises thrive.
This Community Benefit Society focuses on providing local produce and creating routes to market for small-scale local growing schemes. Their retail outlet, which recently added online ordering, operates five days a week (Tuesday-Friday 10am-4pm, Saturday 9am-3pm) and is managed by a board of seven directors. Their staffing model combines a part-time manager with volunteers who typically contribute either 2-hour or half-day shifts weekly.
From our webinar with Carrick Greengrocers, we identified these innovative strategies:
A focused retail offering (fruit and vegetables, some locally made pickles)
Innovative community initiatives like their “Friendly Food Club”
Effective use of share capital as a financial buffer in early years
Leveraging local donations of goods, time and money for shop fitting
Their approach shows how a specialist community shop can combine retail success with social purpose, using a rented shop space to reduce initial capital requirements while making healthy food more accessible to all community members.
We would like to thank the Carrick Greengrocers team for sharing their experiences through the informative webinar. Their social enterprise model offers valuable lessons in specialist retail with community purpose. Our thanks also to Helen Plaice from for participating in the webinar and documenting these insights about Carrick’s distinctive approach to community retail.
