The Yorkshire artisan independent coffee roasters, fishmongers and greengrocers who have prospered during the pandemic

So when the Yorkshireman faced redundancy after more than 30 years in IT, it was time for him to follow his passion - to wake each morning and smell the coffee. His coffee.

Coinciding with his wife Helen retraining as a teacher, he made the jump into a new career, investing around £10,000 in a proper roaster.

It was a far cry from the popcorn machine he’d been using to roast his beans at home in Apperley Bridge.

“It’s unbelievable,” he says.

“Both my wife and myself say it’s been hard getting the business set up but it certainly is the best thing I’ve ever done. It really is.”

He’s not alone, though. Specialist retailers had been creating a jobs boom across Yorkshire before Covid-19.

The region bucked the British trend by experiencing a growth in retail employment between 2015 and 2019.

Analysis of Office for National Statistics (ONS) figures by the JPIMedia Data Unit last year showed that, during that period, the number of retail sector jobs in Yorkshire and the Humber increased by 14,700 to reach 220,000 - a 7.2 per cent boost and the third highest jump in Great Britain behind the North East and South West.

While clothing and footwear and department stores in the region saw an employment downturn of 8.1 per cent and 13.1 per cent respectively, the market at specialist retailers differed starkly.

Jobs in retail of food, beverages and tobacco in specialist stores doubled, in meat selling there was an upturn of more than 166 per cent and in fish, crustaceans and molluscs more than 211 per cent.

This was before the pandemic, of course, and reports in recent days that the UK’s economy shrunk at its fastest rate since the 1920s last year - the ONS has revealed that gross domestic product dropped by 9.9 per cent - cannot be brushed aside.

However for a number of those Yorkshire artisan producers, the pandemic itself, alongside loyal followings harnessed by social media, seemingly led to a mini business boom.

Wright’s love of coffee goes back to the early days of his former job, though initially he wasn’t convinced.

“It had been working in IT since I left college and during that time, when I got my first house, I started getting proper coffee, the stuff from supermarkets, and didn’t enjoy it.”

The craving for caffeine persisted, though, so after a couple of years he tried out roasting in the cellar at home, using a device meant for popcorn popping. “Even on that I managed to get better coffee than at the shops,” he said.

This continued through the years as a hobby, albeit one which earned him compliments at work for the flavours he managed to produce.

Wright, 54, set up Whole In The Ground Coffee around two years ago and now imports beans from locations such as Colombia, Brazil, Mexico, Ethiopia and Vietnam, sells his sustainably packaged coffee in five establishments and has a growing list of returning customers. It beats getting up at 5.30am for the 100-mile commute in his old job.

The quality of his product, the use of social media and a recent bit of exposure on BBC Countryfile - during a segment on Crag House Farm in Cookridge, his first big supporter - have all helped his business prosper during the pandemic.

With the help of his family, Wright learned how to promote his business on social media, without which - along with the website he set up - he would have had “no sales, virtually”.

He says: “It was massively important and with the local social media, I had loads of people saying ‘I never realised there was a coffee roaster in Apperley Bridge’, because I haven’t got a shop or a store or anything. I’m just trying to get my stuff in to stores, to get recognised, but social media has really helped me market the business.”

Wright prides himself on the freshness of his coffee - his bags include a “date roasted” stamp instead of a “best before” - and he wants to get customers to try all sorts of interesting flavours.

“There are so many flavours of coffee out there, depending on how you roast the bean - there so many beans out there, from different countries and varieties. I like to go out and pick and choose,” he says.

His wife and their children Evie, 20, and Joe, 17, help out with the business but taking on new staff may become a necessity.

“If it continues, I won’t be able to do it all,” say Wright.

In nearby Leeds, it has been nearly two years since a band of locals opened The Headingley Greengrocer in North Lane. Bought by the Headingley Development Trust at the end of April 2019 from the Harris family, it kept alive a tradition of offering high-quality fruit and vegetables stretching back more than a century - a greengrocer has traded on the site since 1918.

Board member Helen Seymour says that the business has been growing since, including through the pandemic.

“It’s all very strong,” she says. “Sales are definitely keeping up. In fact, they’ve been increasing.”

Since opening, the shop has provided seven part-time jobs, not including manager Kathy Beels.

The Headingley Greengrocer hasn’t used social media to build its following - perhaps because it already co-exists within a visible community of small businesses - but has recently started an Instagram account to promote to its wide range of loyal customers.

Seymour says: “What they seem to love is the personal service. Being served by people who know their names, and staff are friendly and helpful.

“I won’t say it’s a social activity, that’s putting it too strongly, but there’s a bit of proper human interaction with it.”

She continues: “We make sure we’ve got six different sort of potatoes and a range of things in season. Sometimes people ask so we follow that up. I mean, we’ve got organic turmeric at the moment. Well, who knows anybody wanted that? But they did and we’ve got some in.”

Since his teens, father-of-one Liam Tarbett has been working in the fish stalls of Leeds Kirkgate Market. By his early 20s, however, he had a decision to make - pursue a media career with his degree in Film and Television Production or set up his fishmonger business.

Now aged 33, he has a claim of owning Yorkshire’s largest independent fish retailer with stores in the market itself, Chapel Allerton, Wetherby, and most recently Harrogate, where Tarbett’s set up in autumn last year.

Thirteen people are employed across its various sites - six jobs have been created during the pandemic alone, three of them at the North Yorkshire town’s branch in Commercial Street.

Tarbett says: “We did quite well out of the first lockdown - there was an emphasis on healthy eating and also mouths to feed at home.”

Other independent businesses which have grown during the pandemic include The Cosy Cottage Soap Company in Malton and cheese shop the Silver Hill Larder in Sheffield.

Clara Challoner Walker built the first business online from 2015 before opening a physical store late last year.

The latter shop’s Debbie Broadhurst says that since buying the shop in May 2018, she had “only really seen significant growth through the recent coronavirus which has seen a surge in support for local shops”.