Eat well on Fodder

But she does have a lot to get in. Especially the fact that over Christmas her new enterprise turned the corner and put half a million pounds back into the Yorkshire rural economy. This came about because it ordered 179,000 worth of stuff from Yorkshire food producers, often very small ones, and according to an economic multiplier scale devised by Oxfam, the full value of this works out at 537,000. In short, Heather is driving an engine for change for the Broad Acres.

She likes to celebrate food, not just for what it is but the way it brings people together. Her favourite job would be the narrator of Come Dine With Me on television but adds, "apart from this – this is the best job in Yorkshire."

It's not really one job but two; in fact, let's make that half a dozen since she seems to run everything at this delicatessen-cum-giftshop-cum-greengrocers-cum-butchers-cum-bakers-cum-caf. It's called Fodder and it opened last June in Harrogate on the Great Yorkshire Showground. Heather even thought up the name.

To reach it means turning off the main road at a junction designed to guide you into a big Sainsbury's. So here was a challenge. The new kid on the block had to be imaginative if it was to persuade shoppers to travel the extra few hundred yards.

When they do, they discover the feedbag is as interesting as the fodder – it's a homage to eco-friendliness, a flagship for greenness and sustainable building methods. On outward appearances an exciting showcase for Yorkshire's food producers, inside it contains their energetic and persuasive champion Heather, whose evangelising, once she hits her stride, can put Jamie Oliver in the shade.

We'll skip over the fact that her parents' hill farm is over the Yorkshire border in Lancashire, although not too far over.

The produce is not bad either. The leeks displayed looked glossily perfect, the sort of veg that a food retailer might want for a television commercial with a voice-over cooing, "These aren't just any leeks…"

Parts of the set-up suggest a Marks & Spencer food hall. Heather makes a face at the opinion that some other areas seem more like a National Trust shop. "In that case I've failed. I want it to be an everyday shop, not a once-a-month shop."

She says the prices are competitive with supermarkets. And being an upstart rival has not soured relations with the one next door. "The take at Sainsbury's has gone up since we started, it's like a twinning exercise. It's not about slagging off supermarkets."

As a retailer she's still coming down from her pre-Christmas high. "It looked so abundant then. January's slow, I feel a bit depressed now." Most of her shopping trolleys were lined up snugly in a row when she said this, but the caf was almost full.

Just before Christmas a woman showed Heather a couple of receipts from her big family Christmas shops in 2007 and 2008, the first at Waitrose the other at Sainsbury's. She had now purchased the same goods in Fodder and the total was 30 less. Two items were not stocked – cardamom seeds and panatone – but given the rate of food inflation last year, that's still a striking saving.

Heather is still learning the ropes as a retailer and as a caterer. She had no experience as a builder either, yet she project-managed this hybrid building designed to look like two – flamboyant Fodder on one side and sober-looking offices on the other for the Yorkshire Agricultural Society and staff, plus affordable office accommodation for good causes connected with agriculture.

The place has a sedum roof, no air conditioning (the windows open automatically according to temperature) and ground pumps take the heat from 100 bore holes and deliver it through a network under the floors. "I know about every brick and every supplier," she says. "It was my baby. The wacky ideas are my wacky ideas." She throws open the door of one of the loos with a flourish to point out the basin surrounds, bright swirling surfaces fashioned from recycled plastic bottles.

Some 1,500 fleeces went into insulating the building and Heather insisted a glass panel be inserted into a wall so the contribution of the sheep was visible. She has a thing about transparency. Not a bad thing you may think, bearing in mind the food scares which have periodically alarmed the public from BSE onwards.

"I want to show everyone everything. Maybe we will take customers with us to visit our suppliers as part of our education remit."

Heather has been in Harrogate since 1993 when the Yorkshire Agricultural Society, the charity behind the Great Yorkshire Show, made her their first marketing manager. During her time the YAS has developed the showground, which it owns, and devised events which means it can give away 1m a year to good agricultural causes.

Heather is deputy chief executive of the YAS and managing director of the limited company that runs the events and exhibition hall.

"Fodder was the next piece in the jigsaw. We started thinking about it during foot and mouth in 2001. What could we do? How could we make a difference? The farming community is so disparate. At the Great Yorkshire Show the busiest spot is the food hall. Why not celebrate the best of Yorkshire food every day of the year?

"Our pricing policy is to buy and sell fairly," says Heather who must be commercial while at the same time extending a helping hand to small-time, but cherishable, suppliers.

In some cases they are one or two-man operations which cannot afford to deliver their stuff to Harrogate.

Selling niche food products successfully means discovering not only what is out there but also the story of the people. "At the beginning it was difficult.

"One did fall by the wayside – although they were a couple at the end of their careers. And there are times when you order 100 of something and get 43 because Aunt Betty had a bad leg. We can be more flexible in terms of deliveries than supermarkets could hope to be with a supplier.

"We are more fun, we share their ups and downs with them."

She has 180 suppliers signed-up and in some cases an order has proved to be a life-saver. "One producer told us, 'I thought the business was going to fold and we'd have to sell the farm'. That's success to me."

Small time cannot hope to compete with big time in advertising and small time product presentation is often poor for a reason. "People buy with their eyes, but packaging is so expensive.

"So we ask, how can we help to get publicity for our producers? That's the joy of creating lots of marketing opportunities. It's about helping people."

They are committed to 85 per cent local produce but definitions can be tricky – "Yorkshire meat" is technically meat that has lived in Yorkshire for three months.

Paul Nicholson, the head butcher, who opened the Castle Howard farm shop five years ago, says: "It's a lot harder here. At Castle Howard we had a good customer base with the tourists. Here we've had to start from scratch.

"We have three to four pork suppliers, the same for lamb and six for beef. The other difference with Castle Howard is that I go to the the producers to buy. I check out their animal welfare standards and the quality of the animals. I range over all of Yorkshire."

Why have 15 per cent non-Yorkshire goods? "Because people still want avocados and lemons. You need to have that range, you need that spread," says Heather. When she checked on Google recently to see which of the search engine's recipes were most looked out, Eton Mess and cauliflower cheese were top. She rather despairs over what that says in general about domestic kitchen skills. She sees her brief as trying to encourage them.

Back at Paul's butcher's counter we ask him for today's good idea. It's shin of beef at under 6.95 a kilo. And what do you do with it? "Put it on with onions and seasonal vegetables for three hours one night, and then one hour the next day when you do your dumplings."

Heather concedes that people seem to like the anonymity of supermarket shopping and are on the whole nervous of talking to butchers. At the moment she says the shop here is too big for them. Sir Ken Morrison became a trustee three months ago, which sounds reassuring

"People don't know what's on their doorsteps. We want to get people to change their shopping habits. In setting up, we had help from the Farmer's Cart and Blacker Hall farm shops and we list 60 farm shops in Yorkshire on our leaflet. That's my job. We are here to support. And we're about bringing food alive."

The YAS is the first organisation of its type to set up something like this. Quirkiness is part of its attraction and it will be interesting to see if it can become a model for similar places created out of a can-do, co-operative spirit.