Last year, DB Foods launched its first ever public-facing campaign, ‘Support Your Local Butcher’. Starting with a logo and sharing some initial branded items with customers, we went on to create bags and packaging, branded our transport vehicles and are now putting the finishing touches to a designated website that will champion the independent butcher. Why? Chief Executive, Gary Smith explains.
Whether it be organic butchers, traditional butchers or family butchers that have been passed down through generations, the retail of quality meat still has a valued place on the high street, and never in recent memory has there been greater testimony to this, than what took place during the pandemic.
In 2020, when the hospitality sector shut down in the fight against COVID and people were nervous of going into potential crowds at supermarkets, the local butcher shop became the place communities turned to for their meat. Many family butchers started doing home deliveries and people were full of gratitude for their efforts.
In many cases, we got feedback from the butchers we supply saying that customers were trying new, exotic and more expensive meats as they had money to spend, but nowhere to treat themselves.
Local butchers had proved their worth, but we knew that when restrictions ended and life returned to normal, hospitality venues and large stores would be focused on getting their customers back. We created ‘Support Your Local Butcher’ partly to remind people of when the ‘local butcher shop to me’ was there for them, but also as a marketing campaign for the future.
Though we knew the economy would have to cope with the huge sums of money that were spent on getting the country through the pandemic, never could we have foreseen the consequences of a foreign war causing energy prices and the cost of living to soar.
Once again, the quality butcher is poised to offer solutions. In a traditional butcher you can not only get the exact amount of meat you need for your household (families of three or five often suffer in the pre-packaged multi-buys of the supermarket), but you can get advice on quality substitutions, cheaper alternatives and what to do with them in order to make a budget stretch further.
Support Your Local Butcher is really highlighting a mutually beneficial relationship that large multi-product outlets are not able to provide.
In the age of technology, we know that search terms such a ‘nearest butcher shop to me’, ‘best butcher near me’ or simply ‘nearest butcher’ can bring new customers to the door of a local butcher, but we wanted to create something to physically represent a collective that independent butchers can feel they belong to and bring our customers together in a shared community.
