A popular farm has unveiled plans to expand its award-winning shop and café.
Canalside Farm, in Great Haywood, near Stafford, was bought by the Barton family 40 years ago this year and has undergone various extensions as well as having a new café built and various attractions added.
Now the family wants to extend both the shop and café to create more kitchen and seating areas and also build a covered link building between the two to provide space for events, seating, toilets and a ticket office and entrance to the pick-your-own fields.
A document submitted with the planning application to Stafford Borough Council reads: “The business needs to continually evolve in order to compete in a very competitive and dynamic retail sector.”
It adds: “The Directors need to expand the proportion of products stocked which have been produced/made in the farm shop.
“This is necessary in order to compete with the national grocery retailers who are increasingly looking to compete on offering lower prices.
“By offering products produced on site this allows the business to create a point of difference which customers will recognise and, it is believed, value such a difference.
“In order to produce more products on site requires additional kitchen space of 250m².”
Canalside Farm, which employs 62 people, has won various awards including the title of Large Retailer of the Year in the Midlands at the Farm Shop and Deli Retailer Awards, as reported by Daily Focus.
Its attractions include a seasonal plant centre, regular markets, a summer maize maze and a Halloween Pumpkin Festival.
The café and seating area have been deemed too small to meet customer demand and customer toilets are said to be inadequate for the number of visitors.
The planning statement adds: “To resolve these issues it is proposed to extend the kitchen into the seating area (it cannot expand in the other three directions because of the canal, the septic tank and access road).
“It will be necessary, therefore, to extend the seating area and to provide additional seats to meet the current and projected customer demand.”
Other plans for the Mill Lane site include creating a picnic area by the canal, a new car park and increasing the amount of planting on site.
