Seven Sisters Spices - Lewes based food delivery
If you want to order some delicious food to be delivered up to The Grain Store during your stay, look no further! Read on to hear all about Chloe and her business - Seven Sisters Spices.
Seven Sisters Spices Gift Box
Tell us a bit about your background Chloe and how you came to be based in Lewes.
We moved as a family from Hackney in East London to Lewes in 2010. My partner & I are not on the property ladder and privately rent – Hackney had the London Olympics looming and we were being squeezed out of the area we had lived in for 16 years and where both our kids, who were 5 and 7 at the time of our move, had been born.
My partner is from rural Essex and always wanted to leave London ultimately – I am a born and bred Londoner who prior to moving here had spent very little time outside of the city, as it was where I also went to University.
When we were looking into where we would go, we knew we wanted to move south to Sussex rather than north to Essex. Lewes ticked all of the boxes – affordable, less than an hour on the train to London, good local schools… once we had visited a couple of times we felt it was the right place for us.
Sadly now we are being priced out once again, so we aren’t sure how much longer we will be here.
How and when did you start up your food business?
As soon as we arrived in Lewes we noticed a distinct lack of options for food shopping and eating out. This has thankfully improved a lot in the intervening years.
Hackney has, as with most of London, a mixture of vibrant immigrant communities, the biggest being Turkish and Vietnamese. The influence of these populations locally meant we had a Turkish supermarket at one end of our street and a Vietnamese one at the other – between them you could buy pretty much any foreign and diverse ingredient you could want for. There were also tons of little restaurants and cafes.
In addition, London is bursting with food from all over the world. I felt bereft at the loss of something I had grown up with and begun to take for granted – we all were – so I ramped up my cooking in a bid to capture some of the flavours we were missing.
It also occurred to me that there was a big gap in the market, we weren’t the only people moving from better served areas to Lewes and feeling this way.
Seven Sisters Spices Tiffin deliveries
In 2012 our lives took an unexpected turn when our daughter was diagnosed with non Hodgkins Lymphoma, a type of blood cancer. We were very fortunate to have some savings and life insurance cover which meant that I was able to stop work to look after her – NHL, like leukaemia has a 2 and a half year treatment protocol for girls (3.5 years for boys). Agi’s diagnosis was devastating and frightening, and all the things you might imagine it to be. I’ve been fortunate in life to understand most things that have come along, and to be able to have a handle on issues and challenges.
Unfortunately, treatment protocols for paediatric oncology were way beyond my comprehension, at least initially (all us parents became experts by the end) but feeding the family presented itself to me as something of huge importance (we would all of us need to be looked after through the coming years) and it gave me a great focus. Agi came through treatment well and is thriving now ten years later.
Jump back a couple of decades – I had a studio & worked as a designer maker of textile products after graduating from Goldsmiths College in 1996. I did this work until the birth of our son, Billy, in 2002. I often subsidised my income by working for a caterer, at first as a waitress and then increasingly in the kitchen cooking. I enjoyed the work and learnt a lot, including what a robust business catering can be.
Quite soon after finding myself at home looking after Agi and cooking a lot, I had the idea of selling some of what I made, so I registered the home kitchen with the council and started to apply to local markets in the hope that I could sell my spice blends, curry pastes and dishes there.
Unfortunately, because spices are not a locally sourced product I was not accepted onto any of the local markets. In my frustration, I joked with a friend that I would ‘get a wheelbarrow and walk up and down the high street’, this ended up being a Silvercross pram, which I did a paint job on, I applied for a peddler’s licence and started my Friday Food Deliveries, which are still running nearly 8 years later – although the pram gets less action than she once did!
Chloes Silvercross Pram - Still making local deliveries!
Talk us through a typical working week.
No two days are the same for me work-wise, which is one of the things that I love, although it can at times become overwhelming! I have a stall at Lewes Farmers Market on the first and third Saturdays of the month – I am able to sell there now because I make ready meals and salads, samosas, and sweet treats…using locally sourced ingredients as well as my spice blends, pickles and chutneys. And so on market weeks, I will be prepping produce for sale. I often have Mondays off as I work a lot at the weekends, Tuesdays will be an admin’ catch-up day and list writing, and food ordering in preparation for the week to come.
On the weeks when I am not doing the market, I offer my Friday Food Deliveries – these now go out in stainless steel reusable tiffins to all of my Tiffin Club Members, which makes me extremely happy as sustainability has been a founding principle of Seven Sisters’ Spices. I also use recyclable and some disposable packaging for non-members, but I rarely have many orders from people who don’t use the tiffins.
In addition, I do event catering – things have been very busy this year with lots of weddings and birthday celebrations, people are still catching up post covid, and I have never been busier!
Cookery workshops are a favourite occupation, I currently teach about one a month in the Lewes Community Kitchen. As I am a qualified teacher, following my work with the deaf community in arts education, I love teaching to cook with spices as I feel it combines my strengths.
As a sole trader, I am busy all of the time keeping up with all of the demands of the business. I have a Patreon page and have commitments of spice packages, recipe shares and live cook along with my Patrons. I also run all of my own social media (absolutely vital to my business) and both the static website and the additional shop website.
Tell us some stories of the events you have catered for over the years
I love cooking food for people’s special occasions. It is a real joy for me to work alongside a couple who will be getting married, or people planning big birthday celebrations, I get really excited along with them as the plans start to come together. For the last two Christmases, I have had a customer who buys a year’s worth of Friday Food Deliveries for her elderly uncle in Seaford, this makes me hugely happy too, food as nurture and care and love is very significant for me and I love to offer this service.
Recently I did a big catering job for the opening of a new wing at Towner Gallery in Eastbourne – the presentation was really important and the guest list was 120 people long – challenging and hugely rewarding.
In 2017 I was incredibly fortunate to be approached by Ami Bouhassane, granddaughter of Lee Miller & Roland Penrose, who had written a book ‘Lee Miller, Life with Food and Friends’ that featured her grandmother’s recipes. They were looking for a caterer to make some of Lee Millers’ dishes into canapes to serve at the book launch.
As soon as I met Ami and began to learn about her grandmother’s life I felt a connection – Lee Miller had been a photographer and war correspondent during the latter part of the second world war. She returned from the front deeply traumatised by all she had seen and food became a solace and refuge for her.
I absolutely understood this and related to it because of my own experience of dealing with my trauma at Agis diagnosis, by focussing on food and cooking and the comfort and nurture they afford.
I feel so lucky to still work with Farleys’ House and garden regularly, including teaching cookery workshops of Lee Millers’ recipes in her very own kitchen – pure joy.
Tell us about your exciting new venture!
At the moment I am in the process of scaling up my business, hugely challenging but equally exciting, and have very recently been given the opportunity to build my own dream kitchen in some of the units at Farleys’ Farm!
The units are perfect for my needs, offering me storage and office space with an adjoining larger unit for the kitchen. Being situated in the same location as Farleys House and Gallery, once home to Lee Miller and Roland Penrose is also a total dream. I was art school educated and started my professional life in the arts - so there is a wonderful circularity in my business landing here. It will be lovely to enter this new working community, surrounded by other creative micro-businesses, after so many years of working on my own.
From day one sustainability has been a core value of my business. Whilst working hard to do as much as I can, which includes buying from local agroecological food producers, and using reusables rather than disposables/recyclables wherever possible - having a business with no specific location has made my work very challenging. So it is incredibly exciting to be given the opportunity to build my own dream kitchen space for Seven Sisters Spices here!
To enable me to realise this dream from a financial point of view, I have recently started Crowdfunding at Kickstarter - they help connect creators with backers to fund projects. You can read more about the process here - Seven Sisters Spices Kickstarter.
This will be a huge game changer for the business. Having premises will allow me so much more time to focus on developing the agroecological aspects of my business plan, which are very close to my heart. My dreams of having my own space with full composting, herb & salads growing outside and a thriving allotment is now looking like a reality, which is mind-blowing!
Chloe outside her units and future premises for Seven Sisters Spices
Friday Night ‘Tiffin Tin’ deliveries at The Grain Store
What are you able to offer guests who are staying at the Grain Store?
There is so much that I would like to offer guests at the Grain Store. I will deliver my Friday Food to guests in Tiffins, should they wish to order. If they are staying in a week when I am at the Lewes Farmers Market, they should definitely pop into town to do some shopping and come and find me for freshly prepared salads to take away or for ready meals to enjoy that evening. If their stay involves a special occasion then I can offer ‘Occasion Cakes’ or even draw up bespoke lunch or supper menus for them.
What are your passions and future hopes?
As mentioned briefly, my passions lie with sustainability and particularly agroecology. As much as possible I buy from local agroecological food producers and very much want Seven Sisters’ Spices to be an agroecological food business – meaning that the ingredients I cook with are grown according to traditional organic farming methods. The importance of the soil and scaling back industrial agriculture is fundamental to the future of this beautiful planet.
I have never wanted to expand Seven Sisters’ Spices in terms of having multiple outlets, I am passionate about locality, for environmental reasons, and offering delicious food, grown and prepared with love, to my local community and its visitors is absolutely what my heart desires.
How do people find you?
The best place to look for me is Instagram and Facebook @sevensistersspices this is where I am most active and share the most up-to-date information on what I am up to.
You can also visit my website sevensistersspices.com or come and find me at Lewes Farmers Market on the 1st and 3rd Saturdays of the month, Fitzjohns carpark, 9-1pm.
If you are interested in becoming a Patron, then you can find out more here Seven Sisters Spice Club on Patreon.
If you would like to make a pledge towards my new kitchen, you can find out more here Kickstarter.
5 x things you love about East Sussex?
The downs
The sea
The chalk cliffs
The abundance of nature and wildlife
It’s proximity to London!
Book a stay with us and order in some of Seven Sisters Spice’s delicious food to be delivered right to your door - giving you more time to relax and enjoy your break!
With the South Downs National Park on our doorstep and some incredible villages and towns nearby, there is so much to explore!
Click here for our latest prices and availability including some last-minute dates