How do you fancy doing your shopping by schooner?
Anna Hart tries the ultimate eco-conscious service in Europe – just make sure you order now.
It’s 9am at Hermitage Community Moorings in Wapping, east London, and a century-old Dutch schooner is coming alongside, bearing olive oil, chocolate, almonds, port wine and other delicious cargo. I’m one of a cluster of shoppers here to finally collect the goods I ordered for Christmas six weeks ago.
We all help the French sailors, who have been aboard for several weeks, unload cardboard boxes and pallets. As grocery shopping experiences go, heading to a Thameside dock to take receipt of them straight off the Gallant, a 70ft herring lugger built in 1916, is a world away from Amazon’s ‘‘nextday delivery to your door’’ service.
But it’s catching on. Is this just an Instagrammable, ‘‘peak hipster’’ way to order posh groceries – or is having your festive trimmings delivered emissions-free on a slow boat part of a meaningful sustainable future?
Bristol-based New Dawn Traders was founded in 2011 by Dutch entrepreneur Alex Geldenhuys. ‘‘Our main focus was establishing ‘voyage co-operatives’ across Europe – a bit like a veg-box scheme, but with ships,’’ she says. ‘‘Customers can pre-order cupboard staples online, which are then sailshipped direct from the producers to a participating port where customers collect their goods direct from the ship.’’
Historically, most Mediterranean produce makes it to British shores via lorries that arrive on ferries and continue by road. But since
New Dawn Traders partnered with a French schooner company this autumn, it is now possible to transport sun-kissed delicacies direct from producer to port.
‘‘Ninety per cent of everything we consume in the UK has spent time on a container ship,’’ says Geldenhuys. ‘‘The global economy is addicted to cheap shipping, but it is cheap because it runs on the dirtiest of fossil fuels, which are significantly subsidised for a shipping industry that is insufficiently regulated.’’
This is New Dawn Traders’ first voyage aboard the Blue Schooner Company ship, bringing olive oil, herbs, teas, honey and wine from
Portugal and France to the UK, where it is making stops in Bristol, Penzance, Newhaven, Ramsgate, London and Great Yarmouth.
‘‘Ideally, most of our food needs would be met locally, apart from a few items that cannot be sourced from our bio-region, which could be delivered by sail,’’ Geldenhuys tells me as we unload. Among the pretty boxes of gourmet salts and bags of almonds and dried fruits are eminently giftable bottles of Gente de Mezcal all the way from Oaxaca, sold for upwards of £70 (NZ$141) on the New Dawn Traders website.
It’s all hands on deck – but there’s more demand for this retro mode of transport than you might imagine. Will Uden, one half of Peloponnese olive oil producers Aeithalis, is determined to transport his hand-harvested, extra virgin pressings (which recently won a Good Taste Award) from Greece to the UK by sail, making it a zeroemission product.
‘‘We’ve looked into it, and if we sail it part-load in a boat like this, it really only adds about 20p to the price of a bottle,’’ he says. It’s true that transportation has long been an ethical blind spot for producers and customers alike; many of us look for the ‘‘Fairtrade’’ or ‘‘organic’’ stamp on a bag of Colombian coffee, but even responsibly minded shoppers aren’t yet asking questions about how these goods arrive on shelves of Waitrose.
At present, trading under sail is unquestionably a niche sector, populated by a multifarious mix of environmental activists, purist sailors and canny entrepreneurs. The Gallant is skippered by Frenchman Guillaume Roche, who worked aboard an expedition icebreaker in Antarctica for years, alongside environmental scientists, where he witnessed the decline of the ice caps and climate change first-hand.
‘‘I decided to use my experience to offer a non-polluting way of transporting freight,’’ he says.
‘‘There are a lot of small sailing operations doing good work,’’ says Geldenhuys, as she walks me to the gate of the community moorings, having helped me pack my goods into a cardboard box. Most of the Gallant’s crew are volunteers, doing it partly out of activism and partly out of curiosity, a blend of ‘‘voluntourism’’ and sailing training.
‘‘But if we really want to change things fast, we have to come together and set our course for a better future.’’
And if you get an order in right now, you should receive your goodies in time for the festive season. Much later, however, and you’ll be all at sea. –