The task of Northumberland Cheese Company Hampers is no mean feat. We can't just go through a catalogue, select a few things, and chuck them in a box... it's a bit more than that!
We have hampers on our website the whole year round, but we thought we would give you some insight into all of the thought behind them.
Costings are one of the biggest deciding factors in selecting which products to include. We will not include a product just because it's cheap. But conversally, we can't buy in our products with a huge sales price and include those without being too concerned. In general, we try and set a sales price before we start looking for products, and then we begin the search.
The next stage of building a hamper is to find the products which you would like to include in a hamper. This is the fun part! We search for products through our regular suppliers, our local producers, and we will sometimes stumble across new products when surfing the web, or at a trade show.
We might spot a product that we love, but if we need to spend £250.00 on a minimum order, then that's quite a big gamble to take, as it relies on us selling £250.00 worth of that product before it expires. In addition, we need to ensure that we have sufficient stock to fulfil future orders. This is a bit of a nightmare at Christmas, as we have to forecast how many hampers we might sell, and order the stock in accordingly (last minute ordering is stressful at Christmas, and often you cannot get stock in the December months, as that has the higest demand).
Shelf life on products can be really difficult. If we have to commit to a minimum order, and then there is only a 3 month shelflife on the product, then there is a lot of pressure for us to sell all of the products we need to! Shelf life is especially important to consider around Christmas time, as we often need to place our Christmas orders by 1st October, so we need to ensure that the products will still be in date beyond Christmas.
Many of the big wholesalers which we use are based down South, and so there is a week lead time for a delivery. However, if we use a local supplier directly, we have been known to make last minute emergency orders, and then go to pick them up! It's one of the big advantages of using a local supplier (again, particularly at Christmas).
Our courier won't accept parcels which weigh over 2.5kg. So we can't make a hamper which will be full of bottles and jars, without exercising caution!
Finally, appearance is massively important, as people buy the vast majority of our hampers through our website, and that's our shop window! So we try and make sure that we select a nice number of colours in the hamper box.
So you see! It takes us a very long time to make up our hampers! If you would like to look at any of ours, visit the shop pages: https://www.northumberlandcheese.co.uk/hampers
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