Name: Linda Clark

Business name: Fat Rabbit

Opening hours: Currently offering frozen food for takeaway but closed for dining in due to Covid-19 restrictions

Address: 39 Bailey St, Oswestry SY11 1PX

When did you open your business and why?

We OPENED in 2017 at the Oswestry Food Festival. We opened as a pop-up in what was Radio Café at the time.

The reason for doing that was because I couldn’t think of many places at the time where you could get 100 per cent plant-based food.

I had recently gone vegan myself and my two older children had too. We decided to do the pop-up on the back of that and it turned out to be really popular.

We then decided to go from doing one-day pop-ups to two days.

Liar Liar opened up soon after we had and asked if we would like to rent out the kitchen in his coffee shop. We did that and it went well – we went from one or two days to doing six-days-a-week.

After a year, the Radio Café became available so we moved into there and decided to go full-time by ourselves as Fat Rabbit.

Why in this location?

I LIVED here when I was about 20 and my children were all born here. I absolutely love Shropshire, it’s an absolutely fantastic county and I knew there would be a lot of support for an independent business like mine, and there has been – it has been great.

The support has been brilliant, even during the last 12 months. We have adapted to sell meals in frozen form online – we turned our website into an e-commerce site so customers could order their meals throughout the week and come and collect those on a Friday.

We also did deliveries for those who weren’t able to leave the house.

It was really popular so when we come out of lockdown we will be doing the frozen food side as well.

I am working with Harper Adams University to develop a frozen food range so we can roll it out to farm shops across the county and maybe further.

Tell us about your business

We ARE 100 per cent plant-based – we try to source as many of our ingredients as we can from local suppliers. Nearly all of our fruit and veg comes from Oswestry Market which is on our doorstep.

We offer breakfast, lunch, cakes – a lot of the items are made on the premises by myself and my staff.

We don’t buy things in too much, we try to make as much of it as we can.

In the past we have opened in the evenings, which we might hopefully do again.

During the first lockdown, we turned a bit of wasteland behind the café into a decked area with about five tables there which is a lovely spot.

We’re hoping to do more evening events – we are fully-licensed so we do cocktails as well.

What is your proudest moment?

I’m REALLY proud to work with the people I work with really. We also won an award with the Civic Society which was quite exciting.

But really, every day is a proud moment when you open the doors here. On April 12 when we open again, we’ll feel really good about that every time.

Any strange requests?

Not really – people will sometimes be very specific about what they want, but to be honest, that’s fine for us.