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 Charlie Hicks is owned and run by Daniel Fitzpatrick, Darren Fitzpatrick and Charlie Hicks. Our aim, quite simply, is to sell the world’s best fruit and vegetables both local and global.
Much of the produce we stock has previously only been available to the restaurant trade.
We believe that it deserves a wider audience, no longer restricted to professional kitchens but available to anybody who shares our enthusiasm for the very best.
We prefer smaller growers who grow for flavour not spurious supermarket criteria like shelf size, shipping qualities and cosmetic perfection. We avoid larger industrial growers where pressures to drive volumes up and prices down mean that quality and taste inevitably suffer.
We believe that mono culture is bad for food and worse still for the wider environment.
We believe in seasonality, we don't stock strawberries in January or parsnips in July. Anticipation of the coming season is one of food’s great pleasures, just think how much you look forward to the first English asparagus. Supermarkets insist on year round continuity, a Canute like denial of the seasonality of the best fruit and vegetables. We think this is absolutely wrong, we believe in working with the natural rhythms of seasons, not against them.
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We always favour local produce and buy as close to our shops as is practically possible. Our lemons may come from the Amalfi coast but our berries and summer salads for example will (weather permitting) come from within thirty miles of each shop. A thirty mile radius is our criteria for local. Produce that we do source from abroad is grown for the home market and not for export, there is a marked difference.
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The great majority of our produce, well over 90%, is sold loose not pre-packed. You can choose exactly what you want and packaging is kept to an absolute minimum.
All our packaging is bio-degradable, we do not use conventional polythene In June 2006 a United Nations Environmental Program report estimated that there are an average of 46,000 pieces of plastic debris floating on or near the surface of every square mile of ocean, we don’t intend to add to that.
The air-conditioning and refrigeration used in our shops is as environmentally friendly as new technologies will allow with low energy use and no ozone depleting propellants.
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Charlie Hicks
Charlie has been a Greengrocer all his adult life following a family tradition that spans five generations. He worked mainly in and out of Covent Garden Market - with a four year spell in the Rungis Market, Paris - supplying the top end of the UK restaurant trade with the very best fresh produce. It was in Covent Garden that Charlie first met Gregg Wallace and together they presented BBC Radio 4's cult hit ‘Veg Talk’ for seven years.
Charlie's main aims are to take the produce he loves to a wider audience and share the knowledge that he has gleaned in over thirty years of working with many of the UK's leading professional kitchens.
 Daniel Fitzpatrick
Daniel and Charlie first met in the mid nineties when they worked at Gregg Wallace's seminal supply company George Allan, counting over seventy percent of the London entries in The Good Food Guide as customers. Working closely for over fifteen years with many of the UK's leading chefs has given Daniel an eye for produce and a depth of knowledge that is simply unsurpassed. He is in charge of all our purchasing, overseeing sourcing from UK growers and the major European wholesale markets, particularly New Covent Garden in London, Rungis in Paris and Milan and Sorrento in Italy.
Darren Fitzpatrick
Coming from an IT Services background, Darren is a professional IT and Project Consultant. Passionate about fresh produce and fanatical about the environment, Charlie Hicks has become the perfect opportunity for Darren to embrace all of his passions under one roof. Teaming up with Charlie and Daniel will see Darren apply his unique e-commerce experience to CharlieHicks.com. Fast moving towards a digital era, Darren will enable us to embrace the customers demand for online accessibility to all our products. We will soon marry the traditional shop experience, with our cutting edge online experience, all backed up by a secure payment system with a modern support infrastructure. Customers will soon be able to ‘log on,’ and order their produce, delivered fresh to their home.
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