Grow a Grocery is Unicorn Grocery's guide to setting up and running a worker-owned wholefood shop. We've adapted it with updated figures and a note about scale, but the voice and the experience are Unicorn's.

This page is in our own voice. It sets out the ways SPRoUT is shaping up differently from the Unicorn of today, and why. It's a working document. Where we land on these things will shift as the project develops.

We're based here. Both founders live and work in Leicestershire. Leicester already has allotments, community gardens, food banks, and community kitchens. What it doesn't have is a worker-owned wholefood grocery focused on everyday ingredients.

Around 800 households within five miles of wherever we open, doing some of their regular shopping with us. That's the real target. County-wide awareness or press coverage comes second to that.

Most wholefood shops lead with specialist ranges: supplements, premium plant milks, niche dietary products, snacks. SPRoUT is starting with the things people buy every week. Rice, pasta, oats, pulses, potatoes, fruit and veg, herbs and spices, basic cooking ingredients.

The reason is straightforward. A shop that wants to be useful to a household doing the weekly shop has to stock what they're actually buying. If everyone in Leicester would have to do their main shop somewhere else and only come to us for treats, we haven't built a grocery, we've built a snack shop.

Specialist ranges may come later if they earn the shelf space. The starting point is what people cook with.

Unicorn today is around 1200 square metres and turns over millions of pounds a year. They got there over nearly thirty years of careful growth. The Daily Bread Co-operative in Northampton, which originally inspired Unicorn, ran for years at a smaller size and still operates today.

Our starting model is closer to that smaller, earlier shape: one shop, modest size, a focused range, a simple operation. We'd rather get one shop working properly than open a big one before we're ready to run it.

The brief we're working to: around 300 square metres of trading space, ground floor, on a main route in Leicester. Lean opening hours in year one. A small founding team. The intention is that the shop is sustainable from week one, not surviving on goodwill or grants.

Most wholefood retailers carry thousands of lines. Each line carries cost. Shelf space, stock holding, complexity at the till, and the small but constant risk of waste when something doesn't move.

We're starting much smaller. A focused range of everyday ingredients bought direct from co-operative wholesalers, sold loose or in larger pack sizes wherever it makes sense. Fewer decisions for the shopper, faster turnover for the shop, less packaging and less waste in the system.

This is partly an ethical choice and partly a financial one. A small shop with a tight range is easier to run profitably than a larger one trying to be all things.

On 25 March 2026, Tamsin and I spent the day at Unicorn in Manchester. Twelve of us were there, from co-ops and food projects at different stages. Unicorn took us through the shop floor and the warehouse, and we spent time with the grocery buying, fresh produce, commodity packing, and operations teams.

A few things stood out.

Unicorn is bigger than it looks from the outside. The warehouse, the volume of fresh produce, the number of active worker-owners. It's a serious grocery business that has been built deliberately over thirty years. That confirms the approach we're taking with SPRoUT: start at a workable size, get the basics right, grow from there.

Their prices are not high. That's a deliberate choice. They want to sell good food to people who need good food, not position themselves as a premium destination. The fresh produce in particular is competitive on both quality and price. That's the kind of offer that turns a wholefood co-op into someone's main shop, not a top-up shop. It's the standard we're aiming for.

Internal communication came up repeatedly. With dozens of co-owners, comms either works as a designed system or the whole thing grinds. Unicorn's works because they've spent years building it. We took that as a reminder to design the basics of how we talk to each other from day one, not to bolt them on later.

They were also honest about the things that are still hard, and they're actively encouraging others to build along similar lines. They ran the day at no charge because they want more shops like theirs to exist. That isn't a small thing.

What stayed the same: the basic Unicorn business model still looks like the most workable one we've seen, and the Grow a Grocery guide is the clearest summary of it. That's why we host it here.

A lot is still being worked out. The bigger open questions:

The site itself. We initially evaluated a potential site on Abbey Lane in Leicester. However, due to high flood risks in that area, we have ruled it out and are actively searching for other suitable premises of a similar size (around 300 square metres or more, ideally on a single level).

The wage structure. We know we want fair pay, with members sharing surplus when there is one. The exact starting wage in year one depends on how the financial model lands.

Whether to take outside funding. The development phase has been self-funded by the founders, but opening the physical shop will require raising capital. We are looking for values-aligned funding in the form of donations, loans, and investments from individuals and organisations we trust, with no strings on how the shop is run.

When we'll open. There's no fixed date. We'd rather open later and properly than rush a partial opening.

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If you want the long version, the Grow a Grocery guide is it. The Structural Ethics Charter sets out what we're committing to.