Head of Veg Boxes / Fruit & Veg Box Manager

South East London · Full-time · Early starts (1am / 3am) · [Salary £28,000]

Our veg box round started almost by accident. We’d opened a small greengrocer in Forest Hill in 2020, and people stuck at home began asking whether we could bring a box to them. So we did. It began with a handful of local streets and now goes out to doorsteps across the country, and it has quietly become one of the best things we do.

It has also outgrown being someone’s second job. We’re looking for someone to take the whole thing on: to build the boxes, decide what goes in them, price them, look after the customers who get them, and grow it.

Why this job is a good one

Most box-scheme jobs are packing jobs. This isn’t. You’d own the box from the farm to the doorstep — what’s in it, what it costs, how it’s presented, and what customers think of it when they open the lid. If you’ve ever looked at a box scheme and thought I’d do that differently, this is the job where you get to.

You’d own the box operation end to end — the product, the pricing, the packing and the customers — reporting to our General Manager, who runs the business as a whole. It’s yours to run and yours to make better.

What you’d be doing

Curating the week. This is the heart of it. Every week you decide what goes in, balancing what’s in season, what’s good right now, what our growers have, what the box costs to fill, and what customers will be pleased to find. A box in March and a box in July should feel like different animals. Getting that right, week after week, is a craft.

Sourcing and research. Knowing what’s coming into season, what British farms have coming through, and what’s worth putting in front of people — a new variety, a first-of-the-season something, a producer worth championing. Finding it before anyone asks for it.

Pricing and margin. Building boxes that are genuinely good value and still make money. Fresh produce is a thin-margin business and the difference between a good week and a bad one is usually in the detail, so you’ll need to be comfortable with the numbers.

Making the boxes. You’d be in the packing area, hands on, building the boxes yourself and getting them ready to go out. This is a solo operation: what needs doing, you do.

Looking after customers. Answering the questions, handling the subscriptions, and sorting it out when something goes wrong — because occasionally it will. A box that turns up late, or not at all, is the fastest way to lose a good customer, so how you handle those moments matters enormously.

Growing it. More subscribers, better retention, new box types, new ideas. We’ll back the good ones, and we’d like most of them to come from you.

Who we’re hoping to meet

Someone organised enough to run a weekly operation where the deadline never moves, and interested enough in food to care what goes in the box. You might come from fresh produce, a farm shop, another box scheme, food retail, fulfilment, or a small e-commerce or subscription business — what matters is that you can juggle the practical and the commercial in the same day. You’re self-sufficient: happy working to your own plan, without someone checking in on you hourly. You’re comfortable with numbers and with a spreadsheet. You’re good with customers, especially unhappy ones. And you’ve got the kind of eye that notices when a box looks a bit dull and does something about it.

You don’t need to know every British grower on day one. You do need to want to.

Being straight with you

The mornings are early and the work is physical; produce arrives in crates and they aren’t light. Some of it is repetitive, because packing is packing. And it’s just you: there’s no team to hand things to, so on a given morning you might be pricing the week, chasing a grower, packing forty boxes and calming down a customer, all before lunch. The deadline comes round every single week whether you’re ready or not. There’s no big playbook waiting for you either — you’d be building a fair bit of this as you go. If that sounds relentless, it isn’t the job for you. If it sounds like something you’d enjoy getting your teeth into, we should talk.

What you get

A real business to run, inside a business people are fond of. Proper ownership and the autonomy to go with it, plus the satisfaction of a job where you can see the results every week on hundreds of kitchen tables. [Salary £28,000]. A good team, the best coffee in SE23, and more fruit and veg tha…