Startup interview: Nick McCulloch, CEO and Founder, Provenance Hub

RTIH: Tell us about Provenance Hub

NM: We spend our days talking with artisanal small scale growers and producers, unearthing the very best tasting foods from across the UK and Europe, and each with a powerful story about their provenance and production methods. 

Our producer community is at the heart of what we do. We set out to support the passion and expertise they put into making their products and pay a fair price for them. 

Consumers visiting and shopping at Provenance Hub can find a curated selection of great tasting products not typically available on their high street, and only available to buy together through Provenance Hub. Every product we sell is accompanied by in-depth product and producer information and appealing regional detail.

RTIH: What was the inspiration behind setting it up? 

NM: Back in 2016 two sets of friends decided to leave their jobs, move to the countryside and set up small food businesses. From afar, I marvelled at their ingenuity and watched them grow very successful enterprises, with many of their products winning awards from the get go. 

However, in talking to them, I found that they both faced the same issues in scaling their businesses. Both needed to reach a wider audience, but found it costly to drive traffic to their single category website.

Both had looked at working with distributors and the inevitable increase in their retail pricing needed to support this model; and both had looked at working with some of the big marketplaces which they considered as joining a race to the bottom, selling alongside vastly inferior products where there was no value precedent being set for their hard work and the ‘provenance’ of their foods.

We believed that there was an opportunity to create and build something unique online, working with small scale producers to showcase their brands and products. We would offer them for sale amongst other similar, likeminded non-competitive producers, optimise B2C by creating cross-sell opportunities, while also making clear to consumers the value proposition of their hard work, and building strong consumer and producer communities with shared beliefs and values.

 This was the germ of the idea from which Provenance Hub grew. We’ve since built a solid infrastructure, backend systems and unique technology, and now we’re live, these are the foundations we’re now building upon. 

RTIH: What has the industry reaction been so far?

NM: The reaction has been wonderful: producers just ‘get it,’ and see Provenance Hub as a solution to a problem and so much more than just another channel. We’re a friendly, personable team that sets out to build long-term relationships. 

As ever with projects such as this, and particularly one with such ambitions plans, we have had some delays and been challenged by the volume and number of producers we’re now working hard to activate. Of course, this is a nice problem to have - and with each new producer going live on Provenance Hub, our consumer offering grows that much stronger.

“We’ve been self-financed to date with no external funding sources. Now that we’re live, we have started conversations with potential investors and the reaction has mostly been of surprise, that we have arrived at this point without external investment”

RTIH: What has been your biggest challenge or set back?

NM: We were just about ready to launch as the Covid-19 crisis started to impact Europe. We held back and paused, waiting to see its effects before deciding that we needed to go live and grow our producer community quickly, to support them as they grow out of the back of the crisis. Each one of them has been affected, and in vastly different ways depending on their customer base, market, product and age of their business.

RTIH: What are the biggest challenges facing the omnichannel retail sector right now? 

NM: The move from bricks alone to bricks and clicks is really just retailers adapting to the ways in which consumers wish to shop. We believe that the biggest challenge is that of difference and values. It’s increasingly hard to understand what any brands stand for, and too often, when you scratch beneath the surface they lack any real substance. 

We’re not saying that Provenance Hub has fully defined a solution, but we are a good place to start addressing the problem. We curate and showcase our producers and their products, and if you look to recent consumer trends, such as a search for deeper meaning in brands, we are certainly riding, if not at the start of this wave.

RTIH: What’s the biggest question you have been asked recently by a) an investor b) a customer?

NM: We’ve been self-financed to date with no external funding sources. Now that we’re live, we have started conversations with potential investors and the reaction has mostly been of surprise, that we have arrived at this point without external investment. 

There is also surprise at the scale of our ambition, but we have a strongly held belief that with firm foundations grounded in reality, we can be bold with where we want to go.

Several customers have asked, “Why is no one else doing this, it’s so simple!” The answer is that whilst the idea and concept are simple, and everything we’ve done makes it seem so, there is a lot of hard work behind making what we do function in the way that it needs to.

RTIH: What can we expect to see from your company over the coming 12 months?

NM: The obvious answer is that consumers will see a greater number of products from a greater number of producers, and from a greater breadth and depth of categories. 

We are working hard to process and complete onboarding and will easily hit our target of 40 producers by the end of the summer, and in the meantime we’re finding many more we want to invite to join our community. 

We are also enhancing our consumer messaging, and this is our major focus for the next quarter. More broadly, the second half of the year will see us refine and focus our systems to enable an easy transition for our customers and producers in parallel with the end of the Brexit transition period. 

As part of our preparations, we are building a number of additional services for both our customer and producer communities.