It’s a busy time of year for Paul Kelly. Ever since Delia Smith visited his farm in 1990 and put him in her Christmas cookery book as one of her recommended turkey suppliers, his business Kelly Turkeys has grown and grown.
And to add to his seasonal rush, these days Brits aren’t limiting their turkey intake to Christmas day – last year an estimated one in six celebrated Thanksgiving.
The all-American holiday with turkey as its centrepiece is catching on in the UK, despite the lack of an official day off work. Perhaps this trend is unsurprising when you consider that around 200,000 Americans now live in the UK, according to census data. Many Brits will also have been exposed to Thanksgiving through travel, TV, friends or family, and supermarkets such as Ocado have started to pay attention – the online supermarket launched an American section in 2013.
This growing momentum around the fourth Thursday of November only recently began to gather steam in this country, Kelly points out.
“We have been supplying the Thanksgiving market for a long time, 25 years, because we are close to London,” he says. “At first it was very very flat, basically it was the Americans in London that hadn’t gone home, or expats living in the UK. In the past couple of years we have seen it spike, and I am talking 5% to 15% growth.”
Today Kelly manages the business in the UK, and he recently bought a farm in Virginia to tap into the US market. “It is great for us, it is a great warm up for Christmas. Where we pluck and process gets used once a year, so having Thanksgiving in November you check everything is ok, it’s a perfect warm up.”
If the farm in Virginia takes off, Thanksgiving will be much more than a mere warm-up for Kelly. An estimated 60m turkeys are consumed in the US over the public holiday – the total Christmas market in the UK is around 10m. “I only need to tap into a little bit of it – it’s absolutely massive,” says Kelly.
Noreen Finnamore is the founder of Buckley & Beale, a small business based near Bath, supplying a range of American, British and Irish speciality foods. Buckley & Beale imports gourmet products from the US, selling wholesale to food halls, delicatessens, and big suppliers including Harvey Nichols and Marks & Spencer, which listed a number of their products when they launched their international counter in 2013.
Finnamore says perceptions of American food in the UK aren’t always positive. “Often when we say we wholesale gourmet American products people think of marshmallow fluff and Hershey’s,” she says.
“But if you think of the US, it’s a country that’s really rich in natural resources, they have a fantastic meat industry, dairy, grains, fruit, vegetables, all kinds of fantastic food but not a great deal of the good products have found their way to the UK in the past. We sometimes have a job to do in getting people to understand exactly what it is we are importing and selling.”
Buckley & Beale’s bestsellers include products like Koeze peanut butter, McClure’s pickles (a traditional New York deli pickle) and maple syrup from Vermont. “Around Thanksgiving we do see an uplift in products like the New York deli pickles,” she says.
Finnamore, a 2015 NatWest everywoman awards finalist, says Thanksgiving represents an opportunity for food halls and delis up and down the country. “They could make sure they have something on their offering for Thanksgiving, with an American twist.”
Across the pond, David Henkes, vice president at Technomic, a food and beverage research and consulting company based in Chicago, describes Thanksgiving as one of the biggest family holidays in the US, one that “everyone in the country can get behind”. “It has its roots back in the earliest days of the founding of our country and has really been institutionalised over centuries,” he adds.
And it’s not just on Thanksgiving itself – the night before has consumers spending too. This is one of the biggest going out nights in terms of bar and restaurant sales, Henkes says.
This is where small retailers might be able to cash in on the holiday, both in the US and abroad. While the day itself could be seen as having limited potential for retailers – the traditional meal of turkey, potatoes, stuffing and pie are constants – marketing around the autumn season is rich in potential.
“Thanksgiving is one day and there’s a whole lot of brands that are successful in that day but really to be more successful becomes more of a fall seasonal thing,” he says.
Thanksgiving isn’t as entrenched into calendars in the UK so small businesses have an opportunity to create some new traditions, says Henkes. “There’s a bit more leeway for companies to build and create traditions for Thanksgiving in the UK. If you are a forward-thinking brand maybe help consumers establish some traditions early on.”
So, the Thanksgiving pickings for small businesses could be rich if they play their cards right.
“I have always dreamed about going into the US market,” says Kelly. There’s just one hurdle to overcome – the size of the country.
He says: “What amazed me in the US was the distances involved. In the US we will be wholly dependent on FedEx in terms of growing the business. But [in the US] we have had so much support from the local community. They absolutely love the story and what we are doing.”
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