A Trend Spotters Guide to London 2015: 3rd stop – Eat 17

Mintel is proud and boastful of our 80-plus trends, our team of trend spotters across 20 countries and the 70 odd amazing stories they bring to us every week. But trends don’t just play out on the page, steam on our screens, or come out of our analyst’s mouths. In fact – something we trade in at Mintel – Trends are happening right now in our streets, as insights and dreams turned in to real bricks-and-mortar businesses by brave pioneers and entrepreneurs.

In this new 5-part series, we bring you the very best of trends-in-action from all corners of London. We look into how each business is targeting wider trends and the social, demographic and cultural drivers behind it… Enjoy!

Eat 17 at  SPAR Hackney

UK’s Eat 17 creates a local food emporium. Hungry for a locally sourced cheeseburger? A convenience store to pick up a craft brew? A pizzeria for a slice? How about flowers for your spouse from a local florist? Eat 17 is all that and more.

Whilst retailers continue to tie themselves up in knots about omnichannel, two truths persist for successful business – localism and experience. Here we have London’s definitive destination retail grocer – one that dispenses with an internet-apeing over-emphasis on speed and convenience to satisfy the tenets of our Experience Is All trend instead, whilst also delivering a trusted tasty dose of the community credentials that constitute our Locavore trend.

Eat 17 is a family-run Spar franchise that deals in more than 200 products sourced from local suppliers, whilst still catering to life’s essentials and goods at a wide variety of price points. It has its own in store burger bar, refillable wine station and florist. Oh and did we say they make their own branded Eat 17 Bacon Jam range (now available to buy in just shy of 4000 UK stockists) and have a bar restaurant in a converted cinema upstairs? Its sister restaurant/store in Walthamstow has an in-house bakery and pizzeria.

It’s fitting that Eat 17 is housed in the art deco splendour of a former local cinema, because it is a venue in its own right – one that dares to play with the convenience format to slow it down and create ‘dwell time’, rewarded by extra spending from its visitors. It also seeks to build loyalty and repeat business on the heritage values of humanity and personality, meeting the needs of a consumer society falling back in love with localism and tradition, one that wants convenience, but also community.

This will succeed, because at Mintel we know that this is increasingly what Britons want. As seen in Mintel’s Provenance in Food and Drink – UK, 2013 report, 34% of shoppers say ‘British Origin’ is an important factor influencing their choice when buying food and drink, up from 31% just 6 months previously. 21% of shoppers we speak to are influenced by whether the food and drink they’re buying is local in origin, up from 17% 6 months previously. 

London localism isn’t confined to heritage and tradition though – it’s also delivering fun in the form of the ‘cockney ATMs’ dispensing “sausage and mash” (cash) across the East of the city, and value in the form of the prepaid shopping card “The Wedge”, which grants holders special offers, discounts and invitations to events at affiliated local merchants, whilst donating a percentage of each purchase to local charities. Like Eat 17, these ventures avoid the pitfalls of ‘Localwashing’, by offering tangible individual and community-level benefits of ‘keeping it local’.

To find out more about Eat 17, click here