Chelsea Starkings is Assistant Growing Manager in the East for Greenvale Growing, a seed and potato growing business. The Greenvale Growing team manages over 1,400 acres across East Anglia and Scotland. As a business Greenvale deals with over 350,000 tonnes of potatoes per year, packing them for many of the major retailers as well as supplying household brands such as McCains and BirdsEye.
“I joined Greenvale in October 2024. Our fresh potato growing operation is the largest in the UK and we work with a lot of brilliant landlords, including fellow AF Members. We have a range of exclusive varieties including salad potato Venezia which has gained a lot of traction over the years.
“In my previous role I dealt with the relationship between farm and commercial procurement of potatoes. I wanted to be more on the farming and growing side – I’m a grower at heart. So when I saw the opportunity arise with Greenvale, and especially the opportunity to have a year working closely with my colleague Stuart Liddell and learning from him as he prepared to retire, it seemed like the perfect progression for me.
“We love the business that we’re in, and our consumers love the potatoes.”
“The day-to-day running of things is now part of my job. That includes buying what we need, which is where AF comes in. We use AF as a procurement one-stop shop.
“Stuart and I run the growing business in the East, so we haven’t really got the time to sit in the office any more than is absolutely necessary. Going to different suppliers, getting prices, deciding what we want to do … AF do a great job of doing it for us.
“We benchmark AF from time to time, and they usually come out pretty much on top. On crop protection products, we can spend over £100,000 per year and on average AF do a good job for us. We also buy all our fertilisers (280 tonnes last year) through AF too.
“I like that we can call AF and say ‘Do you know if I can get this?’. 99% of the time they say ‘Yes we can do that!’.
“It’s comforting to know that there’s someone out there who, when we’ve got a one-off thing we need, we can give them a call.”
“For wearing parts, tyres and things like that, we tend to go direct to the sales person, either Ben Burgess or Grimme, and it all gets streamlined through our AF account.
“Fuel cards are another thing that have been useful. Stuart and our fields person Abbie are the main users and the Shell card works well for them. We also order red diesel – we had another 15,000 litres delivered recently and the prices never seem far out.
“We had a chap come out recently, recommended by AF, to our new seed storage site. He set us up with all the new signage and everything else we needed, so we didn’t have to worry about it, it was just ticked off.”
For Chelsea and her colleagues, a passion for growing potatoes is at the heart of what they do.
“We get our AF Statement Pack twice a month, so it reduces the number of invoices that we’re tackling in one go. Otherwise some months we can get a mountain of them!
“It makes our accounting easy. And we use the online Member portal. This year, we’ve used it a lot for sustainability audits. We go through it to find copies of invoices, lists of suppliers we’ve bought products from, export the data into Excel and sort through it as we need to. I’ve found it very beneficial.
“It doesn’t matter whether I’m ringing up for first aid supplies or a large fertiliser order, it’s streamlined through AF and there’s someone on the end of the phone to give me the options and place the order. It means I can get on with growing potatoes!”
Visit the Greenvale website to find out more about their potatoes.
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