Roots Allotments - Christian Samuel

0:03Hello there and welcome to episode 127 of People Doing Things. Today I'm delighted to have Christian Samuel, one of the great minds behind Roots Allotments, the brand that is completely reimagining local allotments for the 21st century. The big muddy problem, gargantuan waiting lists up and down the country, with the average waiting time being two years and some taking as long as 17, making it almost impossible for most people to grow their own food in the UK, made worse by the steep learning curve that often discourages beginners. Root's allotments saw this problem and turned it into an exciting movement, the no-dig revolution.

0:41Founded by a team of friends from Bath, the brand provides a full-service subscription-based plot complete with tools, seeds, unlimited compost and expert support from an on-site patch manager. Today they have over 21 sites from Bath to Sheffield, Telford to Nottingham and a growing community of roughly 5 ,000 with a bold pledge to create a thousand growing communities over the next decade. But as we all know, disrupting the traditional industry comes with challenges. Roots has attracted significant protests from the left and the right of the political spectrum. NIMBY locals who don't want to see their grassland turned into community allotments and those who believe capitalism in any form cannot be a force for good.

1:28In this episode, we'll dig into the mission to democratise growth, how their VC-backed full service model works, the controversial relationship between social impact and scaling a business. Are you ready to get your hands dirty? Christian, welcome to People Doing Things. It's been a long time. I'm very excited to have you on. How are things? Very well, thank you. So where I wanted to start was around this cultural relevance piece, like why is Roots relevant? And I think for me, there's definitely kind of cultural tide of whether you live in a city or the suburbs many of us in the modern world feel disconnected in some way or another from nature phones over fauna social media over soil I know the road to where you are now has been difficult it's been long it's been stressful I know that we've had many a conversation about the irritations along the way but what have been the moments that have brought you and the team the most joy over the last years and what's kind of compelled you to keep going in the face of adversity?

2:34I think the biggest thing for myself and the entire team and we say it regularly in the office obviously with the constant adversity that we kind of get is we receive so many positive messages and emails and whatsapps and calls from our members up and down the country about how it's helped their autistic child how it's brought them back to kind of feeling normal and present in their life it kind of gives them that space that third space to kind of slow down and just really start to take life with a bit more care and due diligence because putting your hands in the soil is just such a refreshing feeling and one thing that I've definitely learned while growing over the last 12 months is it really makes you understand patience and you have to care and nurture for these plants and then you reap the rewards at the end which is generally an incredibly tasty meal but you've grown yourself yeah that you've grown yourself you know where it comes from it's completely organic it's doing good for the planet it's doing good for the soils like it just adds so much value there's nothing really negative that comes from it the thing that drives us all forward as a team because we are ultimately a completely mission-driven organization is the positivity that it spreads as much as potentially we receive lots of negativity even though I do feel like it's a very small percentage of the population but like I was in our Stourbridge location up in Birmingham which has around 450 families now growing on and someone recognized me from the website when I was walking around with No Dig Dave, who's the local patch manager.

4:20And this gentleman came up to me on his two crutches and basically explained that the patch had given him a reinvigoration his whole life because he was a cyclist, semi-professional professional, and broke both of his legs, became a bit of a couch potato for a decade, lost touch with his daughter. And then basically this reignited his relationship with his daughter from them going to the patch every couple of days, tending to their patch, and then he's rebuilt that relationship, and he was so grateful and thankful. And for me, it's partly like this is a job, and this is like what I'm meant to be doing.

4:59But on the same wavelength, you look at it, and you're like, this is offering so much value to people. And through some of our darkest days, 2023 kind of period, 24, like it just kept us going, that we received all these messages, we'd walk down to our bath site the first one and people would come up to us being like keep fighting don't give in like just keep going and definitely there was times where I was like this is coming to an end but somehow or other we've managed to make it survive yeah I think what's I mean I definitely find living in London in the city that I need to go out and have a bit of time in nature whether it's like a run around the park just to kind of ground yourself and experience it but I also have seen lots of kind of friends and friends of friends getting back into allotments getting back into growing and have been lucky to kind of experience little bits of it you do see the joy you see the community you see people becoming passionate about stuff that as you say takes a bit of patience and what's really nice is despite being so connected as a population with technology it's really great for people to have ways to interact with strangers you know whether it's you know a little conversation about tomatoes or whether it's about the seasonality or whether it's about the soil it gives people that excuse to start a conversation with someone they don't know and I think that's rich and rewarding and something that we perhaps miss in today's world yeah i couldn't agree more like i spent a lot of time down at our croydon location this summer and we just talk about so much random stuff to people everyone would show each other their strawberries at the start of the season and kind of everyone's sharing produce and giving tips and like three over from my patch there's this lady beth who's got three patches of dahlias and like it's the most unreal like flower ensemble ever and then her husband was there one day and i was there with my girlfriend and we were all chatting about the flowers and what everyone's grown and then me and him randomly to start chatting because he worked at jp and i was like what like this is just so random you you do get people from all walks of life like i've met so many members that I would have had this preconceived concept of like who grows food prior to roots and then like you meet the variability of like our members and they're just so different and like when investors or partners ask who our members are we simply say we are as diverse as the local community yeah like we have people that turn up in Range Rovers and we have people on Job Seekers Allowance and everyone bonds over this one thing of growing food and everyone's the same there's no hierarchy it's just this place of like almost peace and solace and it just calms everyone down like all of our members say it's like a new home to them which is strange in many ways but there's also the waitlist problem which when we first spoke about it years ago I was completely staggered and shocked by some of the insights and the statistics and I think it you know with people having to wait from 18 months to up to 17 years is a very long time to get connection to nature and to get a space to kind of grow.

8:44That's kind of where the whole thing was born out of. So like Ed had gone back to his home in Devon, started growing his own food during lockdown, came back to London. Me, Ed and Will play squash together every week in Brixton. And Ed was like, we should get an allotment together rather than go into the pub constantly. And we were like, yeah, sweet, let's do it. Like, cool. Like, it's just another fun thing to do at the weekends, right? And Ed came back the following week and he was like, oh, it's like a 25 year waiting list for Lambeth. Because as much as publicly the waiting list is 18 months to kind of 17 years.

9:22Like we've done freedom of information requests on every single council. And we basically asked for how many allotments you have, what's the members, and then how many members you churned last year. And basically in Scotland, which The Guardian recently covered, like the waiting list effectively like 60 years. which is crazy because Scotland the UK as a whole are closing down more allotments than they're building and immediately from like my background I was like hang on surely it's easy to just build some allotments than kind of wait you're like fuck that I'm not waiting for my allotment yeah I was just like there's no fucking way that I'm waiting this long uh like this is stupid and like i i very much like investors and anyone will have heard me say a thousand times it's like my little brother has a self-storage company and i compare what we do very much on a business level not on a social level or anything like that but on a business level we're very similar to self-storage and it very much made it a lot easier to kind of explain to people that had money to give us that we're basically self-storage and I just compared the two we all kind of planned out this plan of like providing an app and like all the education and building around this waiting list part but it's crazy the waiting list like I've done digging now across or I've done no digging um the across like the globe so like France Berlin I've even checked China, the US, Canada, generally speaking, the waiting lists are five to 10 years anywhere on the planet.

11:02Because I think governments just haven't prioritised growing spaces since World War Two. And they've kind of seen it as a secondary thing to housing. And these are the really important things. I'm not discrediting that we have a housing problem in the UK, because we do but they prioritize agricultural growth over self-sufficient growth exactly and so they've kind of just prioritized supermarkets and everything else and not taking care of these very precious spaces like in 1950 there was 1.5 million allotments in the uk and today there's 300 000 but the population has boomed which is why there's now this massive supply and demand gap that's appeared we whispered adversity but i know that it's been difficult and you've been dubbed britain's most controversial allotments and i know that has included you know people blocking you from allotments people hurling abuse at you and your teammates your portrait being smeared over the tabloids, shotgun threatenings.

12:09Yeah. What have been the most like crazy, bizarre, unexpected, scary bits? I think one of the craziest stories we ever had was someone putting an Apple Air tag into one of our team's cars and following them home. That was definitely up there with one of the most like, wow, that's quite wacky behavior. Like we're only putting compost on our field guys, like relax. We've had to get security at the Bristol site to build it because people would turn up. I think the police case file is like 150 cases long. We've had the police threatening to arrest people because they wouldn't move out the way. And we've been pretty conscious of, definitely not the start, but definitely once we started going through this whole process of filming people to protect ourselves, just so we had some sort of collateral but like definitely one of the funniest ones I think we've had is we were planting 6 ,000 trees and hedgerow plants at our Bristol community and obviously that's quite a lot of trees and so it was being brought in on this like van and this guy blocked our access and he was like you can't plant these and we were like we're planting trees like it's it's a good thing mate like you don't have to worry about it and then like we've got a full like vlog about it where he's just like dancing in the middle of the road stopping us and the police have to keep coming back and it's a complete waste of police time obviously the police kind of look at us being like what is going on and we're like we don't know yeah it's been a very surreal experience going through this whole process and like it still goes on today like we had an incident this weekend i was at national history museum kind of trying to take some time off and I get a phone call being like we've got this lady that's kind of ran onto the fields hurling abuse at some members and obviously the members very much stand their ground when it happens and there's only like two or three sites that these kind of incidents happen at but yeah it's been very surreal experience overall to kind of go through this considering we feel like we're doing something so positive and if anything one of the most positive companies that I know of anyway doing something that definitely adds public good and for us to kind of get this such strong visceral like attacks on us is just makes the world feel like a bit it's a bit upside down why do you think people are so great like if you asked a lot of people in a survey would you like to see more young people getting involved in growing or do you think we should grow more trees in the uk do you think we should be more self-reliant in terms of food to reduce the cost of buying it from abroad like do you think people should be more self-sufficient i think on a survey most people would skew yes yeah but when it comes to like you're disrupting my dog walk you know they're prepared to get out a shotgun yeah uh i think there's like two elements to it like there is the element which was has been contested now in court twice is allotments agriculture and by the UK's definition of law we are agriculture a seed is a seed ultimately and kind of there is some people that dislike this they think that it should be changed to like a leisure use or something else which inherently I don't agree with neither does every council that we've kind of gone into battle with per se and I think there's this other argument which this is kind of how I explain it every time investors ask about it because it tends to come up every time and then there's this argument of it should only be the government providing these solutions and this argument kind of the anti-capitalist movement and I think I'm a very firm believer in that capitalism can solve the world's problems and I think there's this kind of reaction of like privatization and kind of these negative connotations whereas we don't see ourselves as privatization because we're we're not taking council allotments and making them our own we're adding supply to the market and we're giving people the opportunity to get growing sooner rather than later and kind of removing that that boundary and we're providing a very different service we provide everything's included so i think there's like two prongs to it there's like some local neighbours which don't like it but the majority of local neighbours across our communities actually grow with us but just generally there's a small loud group generally still in Bristol and then there's this kind of anti-capitalist movement where they believe that we're a privatisation whereas we don't see it that way we see it that we're adding supply we want the government to open more allotments we want the council to not close down their allotments we think that it's a public good they should stay at the low cost that they are like currently councils up and down the country are rising the prices and I don't think that they have a right to rise the prices they don't really offer enough in my opinion to rise the prices they currently only offer the land it's a very weird kind of part of society that we've ended up in I don't think any of us expected it at the first sight because it was so well received the first one in the local area and so we kind of thought oh sweet like everyone's gonna love us scale the joy yeah we'll just like this would be so easy we'll just turn up the locals will love us and then like i always kind of had in the back of my mind i think that like there would be a problem at some point with local neighbors at one site i assumed it'd be kind of when we're much bigger and it would happen at maybe the 20th or the 30th location but just as always with any business it happens on the second location which ended up being like the eighth location because because it took so long to go through the planning courts.

18:22On one side, there's definitely a bit of nimbyism. And then on the other side, I think there is that public-private debate, which I think is gonna be ongoing. But I think the reality to create any change, and I think positive change, you need a combination of like, okay, we want to do good. there is an altruistic motive here that exists but we can't we're not going to kid anyone that it's not going to take money to fund it yeah and also we want to incentivize like you want if you're taking a big risk on your life because you could be doing 20 other things I could um if you're going to take that risk which is a big one you know there's got to be something in it for you because I know it's early mornings, it's late nights, sleepless nights, weekends, the hustle's never ending and the you know adrenaline surfing is hard.

19:23I think people don't fully understand like some of the the difficulties of building something like this. I definitely think we were very naive to it as well at the start like it is highly capital intensive. We are doing government level infrastructure and we are doing it at fast pace as well like the government in the past 15 years I think it is has opened 100 acres worth of allotments effectively in the last two years we've opened 250 acres and next year we'll have opened 500 acres in three years and it's hard like not just for myself for Will for Ed for every single team member on the team like the build team throughout the summer months like we can only build in kind of the late spring early autumn and summer months so we have to put all of our growth in basically a five month period and it's basically 16 hour days every day for every single member of the build team and then the office team is doing 10 to 12 hour days very regularly and we pay as well as we can ultimately we are a startup and everyone is mission driven and kind of very much pushed forward by the members and all these positive messages that we receive all the time and like it's highly capital intensive like I've said before like how much money we've raised and like that's about to double again and And we want to solve the global issue.

20:57And based off the maths that we can get, like there's something in the region of 16 ,000 to 50 ,000 locations that need to be built in the next 10 to 15 years to fill this kind of demand of people wanting to grow their own food. And it's in the region of 150 to 200 ,000 pounds of location. and you do the maths and you're talking government level of funding required to solve this problem yeah and i would love the government to step in to be honest but you would not get given how long it takes the government to make decisions yeah you just wouldn't get anywhere you wouldn't get anywhere it would end up in committees yeah for years before anyone's even thought about how you're to get some money to fund it and who's going to run it yeah and then people would not be working 60 nowadays no i think i read the other day i can't remember if it's the dartford tunnel or one of these new tunnels they want to build in east london billions over budget they've spent 300 million from the planning yeah there's 360 000 pages of these planning documents i don't know who the hell is reading 360 000 pages like this country is kind of in this stranglehold of let's talk about doing things and pay ourselves to talk about them yeah there's a market in regulatory behavior now yeah and bristol council built 200 allotments last year i don't know if they've actually built them yet but they spoke about building them and they said oh we've put two million quid aside to build 200 allotments or something and i was like that's like five six grand a patch or something i was like i don't even comprehend how it's costing that much money yeah like I just physically can't wrap my head around it and the only thing that I can put it down to is constant talking and paying themselves to talk to each other it's sad because they could solve these problems because they do have the access to capital and they do have ways to solve these problems but they clearly don't want to I think it's dangerous because the more we regress into just talking about stuff the more everyday people get frustrated that nothing's changing I think you can tell by the political climate in the country at the moment that people are a bit frustrated that stuff is not happening and that it gets just talked about over and over again.

23:28And personally, I think the government should be encouraging more entrepreneurial solutions to innovate on stuff like housing, but also with what you're doing. so I think it's power to the people like it's down to the people to solve the country's problems and not to depend on kind of government at this point within many reasons I guess bringing it back to kind of roots and the way that you're structured as a business I think there's a really interesting chemistry between the three founders that I haven't seen in any other business I've had on the podcast I think it's really unique and I think it makes you guys really special you know you've got Ed the gardener you've got Will the farmer and yourself the entrepreneur how do you guys kind of I guess like wrangle the roles do you guys get into tiffs at all how do you stay positive how do you divide and conquer as a team like the roles were always pretty well defined within reason from day one like Will would build and operate the sites Ed would manage the communities education and kind of the brand touch points from kind of how we operate the growing education the events on site and the actual physical communities and manage the patch managers up and down the country and then I would finance and market the site so I would do kind of the growth marketing and kind of the cpa driving stuff and ed would kind of do the nice fluffy uh kind of brand related your favorite and then will will would build and operate obviously him coming from a farming background meant that he understood how to drive a digger and he understood how to kind of get compost delivered to site and understood all of the fencing and because obviously we built the first site ourselves to save on money and that kind of really drove kind of the direction of the business and kind of who did what and we've always pretty much stayed aligned there like still today I'll run a lot of the TikTok, Facebooks like any sort of direct marketing type stuff and then Ed will manage all the patch managers which I think we've got like 25 of them now across the uk and then will manages the build teams and then the hq kind of falls kind of under the three of us depending on which department helps each founder because you guys have been mates for 15 years now yeah and like we met each other uh yeah bath locals met each other when i was running nightclubs will was just getting into nightclubs ed worked behind the bar i kind of where my Thursday night was and kind of just stayed mates throughout kind of our lives even though that sometimes Ed was in London I was in Cardiff Will was in Exeter we would all kind of meet up once every couple of months for a party or whatever we were doing and always stayed in touch and then that was consistent while we all lived in London played squash together and then basically it came out of these squash games and we spoke about it for months before we were like shall we do it shall we not do it like is it worth it it's a lot of money to kind of risk because ultimately you've got to build the whole thing and if people churn at like a 15 % rate like the whole thing's in the bin in 12 months and I remember Ed's dad coming to me at the start of the first site and it was sold out and he was like you must be over the moon I was like no no not yet not yet give it a year and I'll let you know we're so different as people and like we've definitely changed as we've got older and kind of mostly fallen more into kind of where we were all leaning to at the start and ed really couldn't care one bit about the money side i don't think he's ever checked a p &l he doesn't care that's completely dependent on me and will is like 50 50 in that and then i'm a bit more like we need to make this work financially otherwise the whole thing will fall over and we just all work together and it goes in ebbs and flows like if everything's going really really well like we can lean to more towards ed's kind of way of thinking if things are starting to go bad protests legal bills etc etc we'll lean more towards and we'll just fluctuate between it and we find a balance somehow i guess the people listening green fingered or not will be curious to know a bit more about the no dig revolution i've always found it a little bit difficult to get my head around it so it'd be good to just hear about like what does it mean yeah so it basically it was modern day pioneered by a guy called charles dowding who has been with the company from day one pretty much i think maybe like day 20 or 5 or 30.

28:29We went to his house. He has a massive social media following. He's known all over the world for kind of pushing this for I think multiples of decades now. And basically what you do is you lay cardboard down. You then put five inches of compost on top and then the cardboard suppresses the weeds because no light can get to them. And then the compost on top is kind of what you plant into and then the roots will push through the cardboard because they've obviously got the power of the sun and the light to push it through and then this enables you one to do less watering because compost holds water far better than the soil beneath two less weeding because the cardboard prevents the weeds from coming up not 100 i will say that as a caveat just as some members sometimes like i've got a weed and you're like well it is gonna happens sometimes yeah and then there's the positive element from the repairing of fields which i think i am kind of blown away that we've been running down this path for the last 75 years the industrial agriculture has slowly been removing the topsoil from all of our agricultural fields across the uk and that's where the good stuff is that's where the good stuff is right and the organic matter levels in our soil have just been slowly reducing more and more since I think it was like early 1930s and then what's happened now is 60 years from now basically our organic matter levels will be so low according to UN that we basically won't be able to yield any crop so we've basically got about 60 harvests left until we're kind of really screwed and And basically by putting the organic matter or the compost on top of the soil, this is constantly regenerating the soil beneath.

30:23And this enables organic matter levels to kind of rise and come back to a solid level where food growing is possible. You get high yields from no dig. And it's what we're going to scale globally. And we are very strong in our belief that we won't change this at all ever. like this is what we're pushing forever and it's such a solid part of our brand it's also easier for the consumer it's way nicer to do like with the current allotment system you kind of double dig it it's back breaking it takes hours to set up the allotment each year whereas us you turn up you plant your seeds you water and then you can start chit-chatting and it's just way superior of an experience for people just starting out?

31:12As we know and as we've discussed like Roots is all about growth I think there's a sense of inner growth for allotmenteers physical growth for kind of the plants and the vegetables and I guess spatial growth for the number of allotments and locations across the country I know Ed's responsible for community Will for running and setting up the locations your responsibility is really kind of financing it but also kind of growing the awareness of the business and making sure all the numbers add up which I know some you know something the councils aren't are failing in perhaps how have you financed the growth today and what are the future ambitions with that particular kind of vertical so today we've been extremely fortunate so we put our own money in for the first location as it was a bit of a mental idea and I remember telling people and they were like you're going into what allotments and then kind of we sat on it for kind of this six month period to understand kind of the metrics beneath the business and then like I'm super grateful for all the shareholders and investors that we've got on board like they've really backed us at kind of times when we had all these court cases going on and kind of just costs kind of just ballooning and like going through the whole bristol malarkey and we have raised predominantly equity to date or all equity to date in the region of about six and a half million pounds and then moving forward that will kind of slowly change over time as we're kind of at EBITDA kind of break even now and every kind of bit from here is kind of slowly starting to pay back that six million in profit and that's on like an there's one thing that I explain to like the team regularly is they're like oh we've hit EBITDA positivity I'm like yeah well like the reality is we're also going to most probably double the size of the company again next year which is like another four to four and a half million pounds in capex and kind of we're seeing it a lot more in kind of the last four or five years there's a lot more companies moving into these capex heavy models like data centers and kind of unplugged anything that's kind of a bit more physical and so to date we've funded it from the innocent smoothie guys at Jamjar Ventures.

33:45They've been super, super supportive. Your friends over at Active, partners. And then we brought on kind of someone that is incredibly well known for kind of what he performed and how he performed throughout the early 2000s. Sir Terry Leahy, who kind of built Tesco to kind of where it is today and scaled it to 6 ,000 stores, which is just crazy. I did the maths. I think it was like a store and a half a day or something he was opening. And so we've basically funded it to date with equity. And the long-term ambition is for us to get to 1 ,000 communities across the world. That's the Roots 2033 pledge, right?

34:27Yeah, the goal by 2033 is to be at 1 ,000 communities. And that's roughly around 250 million of capital investment we'll require to do that. obviously some of that will start to be self-funded as we kind of go into these kind of year five year six year seven but still like if we're going to be doubling and getting ourselves to a thousand communities across the world we'll still be having to raise gargantuan amounts of money every year and i think it's one thing that i said from day one i remember like it was yesterday sat in the jam jar offices with the innocent founders and they're like so what's the biggest kind of blocker for the business and I just was like money yeah it's gonna sink a lot of money like it costs to build these things so much money and time and resource and people and we want to pay people fairly as best we can and it's just doubling the size of the company every year naturally you won't be able to afford to do that every year like it's so you need outside capital to fund it and we're starting to kind of get big banks to help us with like funding debt alongside the equity so it's less dilutive but ultimately this is going to be quite a journey for the next until we're at 2033 yeah which is and compounding year on year and sort of showing up with the same vigor every year exactly every day 364 days of the year yeah what's the good vibes project that you've also kind of spoken about in the past so it was something that like We all kind of knew from day one.

36:07And because obviously, as we mentioned earlier, this is kind of the first ever time this has happened in history. There's a private operator in this space. We wanted to always kind of provide social value back to local communities and where we're operating. So we try and run good vibes projects for every town or community that we're doing a location in. And so that makes up of rebuilding school gardens. On site, we kind of give a certain amount of allotments to kind of charities because charities can't take council allotments because the bureaucratic system doesn't allow them to. And then we also bring local school classes to our sites and educate with our local patch managers, the local school kids.

36:52you'd be blown away by the amount of school kids that think veg grows in Tesco and it's a great thing to see to be fair because by the end of every single season kind of you start with these kids that are like I don't want to get off my iPad I want to be on my iPhone and then by the end of the season they're kind of throwing that in the compost bin and going straight to the soil and playing around with the veg the Good Vibes Projects is basically a way for us to provide value back to local communities aside from routes to kind of local veg schemes so like I think the number roughly is now in the 25 ,000 mark 20 ,000 mark across all of our sites in terms of free meals that we've given out to kind of local vulnerable people we'll partner with people so like in Croydon we partner with Peckham Soup Kitchen in Bath we partner with Crop Drop and we have these kind of local partners they prepare these meals and they get them out to the people that need them most and that comes from all the members goodwill and it's basically all of the surplus veg that the members create we've got a little kind of donation shelf at the sites and people put their veg on it once a week the local partner will come pick them up and then go prepare the meals and give them out yeah amazing and thank you so much for coming on people doing things um thanks for having me whether people like it or not fucking hammer it home and i wish you the best of luck i appreciate it cheers that was christian samuel one of the founders of roots allotments on people doing things as always i've been your host ed little and if you are feeling particularly generous of spirit reviews go a long way to helping this podcast grow so please head over to spotify or Apple and leave one.

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