Store Spotlight: Fodder Wholefoods
Mark Hubbard of Fodder Wholefoods tells Rosie Greenaway how he went from foodie to food store owner, putting his stamp on Hereford’s iconic cobbled shopping lane.
Turn your gaze away from Hereford’s grand cathedral and your eyes will land on Church Street, a popular pedestrian trading lane dating back to Anglo Saxon times, now home to Fodder Wholefoods — a renowned small business which attracts customers from as far as mid-Wales.
Opened in 1978, Fodder established itself in an idiosyncratic 14th century building with ‘wonky windows’ and foundations which have been shifting for aeons. Today, the store thrives under the ownership of Mark Hubbard and his husband Phil Wilson, who purchased it in 2014.
As a former staff member, Hubbard has been involved in the business in some way since 2002, after moving to Hereford where he has multi-generational family roots. He first stepped foot into Fodder as a customer, then became a part-time employee and finally the proprietor. “I just got it; it felt like coming home. I got the business and I loved it. I know food, I love food — I love alternative food. I’m a really good cook. I’ve always been interested in wholefoods, and I’ve always tried to eat organically.”
His passion for climate-friendly food combined with his natural business acumen resulted in exponential growth in the first two years. Together, Hubbard and Wilson have steered the business through challenging trading conditions, pivoting through the pandemic, withstanding rising rates and eventually becoming debt-free — a justifiable point of pride.
Now, the double-fronted shop has never looked better or been in more robust financial health, with both the shelves and the books reflecting abundance.
“A wholefood shop shouldn’t be gravel and oats. It should look abundant all the time. The shelves should be full of colourful produce. People like to come into a business that feels like it confidently knows what it’s doing and does it well.”
Dressing the set
Externally, with the help of his 11-strong team, Hubbard practices what he calls ‘dressing the set’ — a joyous and intentional ritual he likens to a theatre get-in, whereby each morning modern metal trays of vibrant fruit and veg are hung beneath smart monochrome awnings, and baskets are neatly stacked at the entrance.
For a period of six years, the shop space opposite Fodder became home to its sister store, Fodder Lotions & Potions, dedicated to beauty and supplements. “What we discovered was that quite a lot of people wouldn’t walk into a wholefood shop, but they would walk into a beauty care shop.”
The second site survived COVID before the energy crisis caused bills to skyrocket from £6,000 a year to £24,000. After closing the store in May 2022 over profit concerns Hubbard was delighted to discover that rather than losing customers as he’d feared, Fodder’s original premises in fact absorbed the footfall from the health and wellbeing store.
The business then entered its most profitable year to date. Keeping beauty SKUs as local as possible, with most brands producing in the rural Hereford area, has been key to successful beauty retailing. “People love the fact that their face cream is made just down the road on an organic smallholding.”
Hubbard describes the past decade of owning and running a wholefood store as ‘a really joyous thing’. “You’re never going to be rich running shops like this [but] it’s a very nice life. The wholefood shop world is inhabited by lovely people. We have a massive, very loyal customer base who get organic. Fodder is incredibly lucky; we’ve definitely got a monopoly in Hereford and we’ve got a virtual monopoly for the whole county. I’ve kind of made it up as I go along to be honest, because I’ve never run a business like this before — what I think works, has worked.”
By Rosie Greenaway, editor