About Us

Tony, Natalie (Green Fields) and Andrew

FoodCommerce was born back in July 2005 from the frustration of not being able to buy online from farm shops and family butchers like we could from Tesco. At that time Tesco was the only supermarket offering online grocery shopping and we were “early adopters” and absolutely loved it. We would order on a Wednesday and have our shopping delivered stress-free on Thursday evening. So instead of joining everyone else in the supermarket scrum on Saturday we would be on the hills walking with our dogs, or doing something else equally enjoyable.

However we were choosy about our meat and wanted it properly hung and from well cared for animals and for this we had to drive out to the farm shops.

There were a few farm shops trying to sell online but unfortunately they weren’t doing it that well. We looked into this a bit further and quickly found their difficulty, the e-commerce software generally available was unsuitable for selling food and to have something better created would have cost too much. So we set out to do something about it…

18 months later we had finally written the software and launched our first pilot online shop, www.greenfieldsonline.co.uk. Our second pilot shop.fordhallfarm.com was launched six months later. Since then we have learned a lot and FoodCommerce has gone through many changes to evolve into the mature product it is today. We are proud to say both our pilots are still going strong today.

Andrew is our software developer and is responsible for writing the FoodCommerce application and looking after our servers. His IT experience includes five years working for Siemens both in network infrastructure and application development.

Tony looks after everything else including customer support, so is the person you will speak to if you have a problem. He has previously managed the Logistics function with major international companies and has extensive expertise in implementing and running ERP business systems.

More recently Ruth has joined our company helping out in marketing and accounts.