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Lifelines: Keith Abel

I was brought up in Little Chalfont in Buckinghamshire. When I was young I'd go out with my mum to this little parade of shops which had a butcher, a baker and a vegetable shop. We had a relationship with the people who ran the store and we'd chat with them. That, for me, is pretty normal.

I trained to be a lawyer. First, I went to Leeds University to study history and economics. I used to sell potatoes door-to-door because I was broke. I'd spent all my grant money one term going to Kenya on holiday. I used to bash on doors on housing estates in Leeds and, if I sold a hundred bags of potatoes in a day to customers, I got £50 a week. In 1985 my rent was £13 a week and beer was 50p a pint. It was seriously hard work but I could live on £50. There was nothing special about these pota-toes.The only thing that was clever about it was that it was weekly - you basically signed someone up to a subscription. So I thought, right, that's what I'm going to do.

So I nicked £2,000 off my brother - he'd had some leftover travellers' cheques - and I went and bought a van, a set of scales and put a deposit down on a warehouse. I turned up at Covent Garden market in London at 2am and bought a ton of potatoes. Then Paul Cole and I went and sold the whole lot.

That was in 1988. By 1989, I was starting to buy potatoes direct from farms. One day, one farmer came along to me and said: 'Do you want some organic potatoes?' I hadn't a clue what he was talking about. He said: 'I haven't used any chemicals on them.' When we were flogging bog standard red or white potatoes, all anyone would ask is how much are they? That's all they were interested in. And if the local supermarket did a price promotion my sales would fall through the floor.

At the end of my first day flogging organic potatoes no one had asked me how much they cost. Eventually, we'd get chatting and they'd ask about whether we sold other vegetables. That's basically how it all started. Some days I'd turn up and a customer would say: 'I've got this recipe that I tried with your Jerusalem artichoke - here it is.' So we thought, that's a good idea, we'll print that out and give it to customers. That's how the newsletter inside all our vegetable boxes came about.

I don't think that the business models used by supermarket delivery services work at all. Ocado got good market share but it doesn't make money because they're going down every street eight times a day. At Abel and Cole there's a lot of very practical thinking going on - common sense and old-fashioned values. It's about listening to customers very carefully and, where it is practical, adjusting our business model accordingly.

We recruit people very much for their values - a genuine concern for the environment and a sense of fairness in interacting with suppliers. We want them to buy into the values that are going on behind the business. If you came here you'd be really struck by the atmosphere. We have a lunch club, so everyone cooks lunch for each other because we think eating's something to celebrate. It's a very different experience to just heating it up in the microwave.

I'm now involved at a strategic level. The business itself has got three main growth areas: broadening our range of products, expanding geographically and looking at other routes to market. I don't think getting involved with supermarkets would really fit with our values and I don't want to find myself in a position where we've got to compromise. Our buying policy is: UK when UK is available and when we have to go outside of the UK we go to Europe. Everything's brought out by boat - we've had a no-air-freight policy since 1988. We've been banging on about it for years.

Keith Abel is the co-founder of Abel and Cole, the organic home delivery company. He is the author of Cooking Outside the Box published by HarperCollins