 My name is Chris Baker and I started Zingerba Whole Foods in 2014. I suppose it was a bit of a lifelong dream to have a Whole Foods shop after 20 odd years being a lawyer. So here we are. This is Zingerba Whole Foods. We do all sorts of nuts and lentils and dried fruit and lots of packets and jars and teas and pasta and peanut butter and snack bars and chocolates and anything you can think of that's yummy and delicious and good for you. Why did I start up Zingerba Whole Foods? Well, I've always had a bit of a thing about food and particularly good and wholesome food and cookery and the science behind it. And the opportunity came along and I'd heard that there was a Whole Foods shop in Llangotland which had closed so I thought well there's an opportunity to make it happen. This sort of dream that had been at the back of my mind for many years. So I did it and here we are. Customers I think, I hope value what we provide, the service we provide, which is not just coming to the shop, buy what's on the shelf and go away again. We're able to provide a personal service, some expertise to go with the products we sell. We can help you out if there's a new kind of ingredient like say lots of people want to try tofu but don't know how to cook it. Also, perhaps we don't have something that you want but we can get hold of it while we're happy to buy things in especially either to buy the winter one off or to say okay that's something we'll start stocking because clearly there's a demand for it. I think we've seen over the last five and a half years that Zengibar has been going more and more people interested in environmentally friendly products particularly household cleaning and toiletries, shower gel, toothpaste, all that kind of thing and in organic food as well and I think that reflects a general greater interest in and concern about environmental affairs. So yes, we are seeing growing demand for more environmentally friendly products and sometimes although it's something that's close to my heart, I find customers are pushing me further than I thought of going. We already have some local produce at Zengibar. We have eggs from just up the road. We have vegan cakes that are made locally. We have some handmade creams, face creams and body creams and we have local honey. At one time we had locally grown salad and other vegetables but sadly they weren't able to continue supplying us so there's a bit of a bit of a gap there. We'd like to be able to fill it. It would be great to hear from local growers, local producers. We're always willing to have a look at what you're offering and perhaps we'll be able to stock it and Horticultural Wales provides a sort of forum where you can, we can find out about what other people locally are doing and that's a bit of a hub for or cluster I think is the word they use for providing that connection between growers and producers and retailers. Certainly Covid and the lockdown had a big impact on the business. I remember the first day after the lockdown was announced we sold as much in that one day as we would normally sell in the whole week. It was just frantic and those first few weeks we found the shelves almost being stripped bare certainly in some parts with flour, pasta, lentils, things like that selling out and then finding it difficult to buy stock in because the wholesalers were running short and at one time we just couldn't get bags of flour at all. We bought in bigger sacks of flour and were bagging it up ourselves and then the wholesalers couldn't get the big sacks of flour but fortunately our local bakery came at the trumps and were able to supply it with some sacks so we could still keep serving our customers with small quantities of flour that they wanted. We started off back in March restricting the number of customers in the shop and then when the lockdown came along we had to close the door and say no customers in the shop and largely to begin with it was simply people emailing or text messaging in or phoning in orders we would put the orders together they would come and collect it so we lost all that customer interaction they banter over the counter that we were used to and it's an important part of a small shop like this it was a very functional kind of relationship at that time as things have changed lockdown has eased we're gradually moving back to opening up to more normal business but we're still mainly serving customers from the door rather than in the shop some customers with a mask and sanitized hands will come in and it's early days yet of that sort of way of working so we'll see how it develops the order and collect service hasn't been an entirely negative experience we have had the the positivity of knowing that people are able to still get the food they want despite the lockdown that they can still approach us with questions and we can provide hopefully some answers we can still order things that they especially want that perhaps we wouldn't normally stock all that has carried on despite the changing way of doing business the the summer months april may june july as well were much busier than normal both in terms of the amount of trade we were doing each week and the time it took to do it because when customers come in to browse and choose things themselves you can be getting on with some other jobs perhaps while they're doing that but when you've got to take their order sort out any queries then go around the shop and collect all the things and put it in a box and work out how much it is and ask them to send you the money via the internet or or whatever it's a lot more time-consuming but it's something we were glad that we were able to do to be serving the local community keeping people supplied with food zingabo is in a way a sort of community hub for people who are interested in good food and environmental issues