Oliver’s Wholefoods celebrated its 27th year of selling natural and organic products in Kew, southwest London, last month.
To celebrate, the balloon-festooned store served organic Prosecco and cake to everybody who came in, as well as giving customers goody bags filled with products from the shop.
The shop’s owner, Sara Novakovic, told NPN about the day of celebration: “It was great, people always really like it. Every year people ask us ‘when’s the birthday, when’s the birthday?’ – our regular customers love it – and on the day the shop is much busier. For me it’s an important event to say thank you to our customers for shopping here for so long, because a lot of them have been coming here for 27 years and I’ve known them for that long. It’s always an extremely busy day.”
Novakovic says that since the store opened, the customer base for organic products has definitely changed. “I think we’ve got a younger demographic for sure, and also that men are more interested in buying organic. When I opened, I remember Danny Wells saying that the demographic was women between 30/35 and 60/65. I was reading Jim’s comment in October’s Natural Products News where he said that now the demographic is people under 35, so that has changed.”
She has also seen a marked increase in available products for the sector. “When we first started you couldn’t get organic sugar which meant there was no organic chocolate. And ten years after we opened, the supermarkets started selling organic milk, but we couldn’t get it. But now you can get 99% of what you want organically; the availability of products is much better.
“There’s also a much fuller understanding among people generally about the fact that the food you eat massively contributes to good health. When we first opened it was seen as a very odd, unfashionable thing to do, and now it’s trending, now it’s fashionable. Food and health and organic are definitely mainstream; it’s no longer alternative, but seen as sensible.”
