• To source the best products from Cumbrian and British artisans, gathering together products you’ll struggle to find in a physical location anywhere else.
• To do the research on provenance and supply chains so you don’t have to.
• To be honest and transparent, enabling our customers to choose authentic British products with provenance you can trust.
• To select our suppliers carefully so that their sustainable ethos matches our own, ensuring we can all tread more lightly on the planet.
• To support local industry and maintain traditionally-skilled, heritage crafts, providing a physical space for these talents to be discovered and explored.

• To pay our suppliers promptly and pro forma: an essential part of helping small businesses maintain cash flow, so they can keep creating their unique products.
• To use local tradespeople and work with local businesses, even in areas which aren’t obvious to customers, such as building maintenance, fencing and joinery.
• To pay significantly above the living wage, ensuring our employees have financial security and certainty of lifestyle: we are building a community amongst our workforce, as well as being part of our broader Cumbrian community.
• To provide a welcoming start and end point for those seeking to explore the Thirteen Valleys of our incredible National Park.

It’s one thing to say we focus on ‘UK provenance’ only, but how do we define that?

In practice, there is no commonly-agreed definition for what constitutes products ‘made in the UK’, or with ‘UK provenance’. Even the definition of what countries are included in the United Kingdom can be disputed, though we interpret this in the traditional way, to include England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.

The closest UK law gets to defining UK provenance is the Trades Description Act of 1965, which suggests that “Goods shall be deemed to have been manufactured or produced in the country in which they last underwent a treatment or process resulting in a substantial change”. As you can see, this is still quite vague!

So, here at Grasmere Gather, we define ‘UK provenance’ like this:

• Products must have been made or assembled within the UK, and
• Products must have been significantly changed via a treatment or process which occurs within the UK, and
• In every case possible, the base elements or ingredients must also have been grown, harvested, or sourced within the UK.

Where it is impossible for the raw ingredients to be harvested within the UK (for example, chocolate or coffee), the above rules still apply for us – the production, assembly or treatment process must still have occurred in the UK. In these cases, we investigate the ethics, both social and environmental, of these products’ supply chains even more rigorously, and we are completely transparent in the very few cases where products are not 100% grown, sourced, made and treated in the UK.