I wasn't looking for a farm shop. I was near Reading picking up something from a ceramics place, miles from anywhere I actually know, with absolutely no idea what was around me — which is, if I'm honest, the exact scenario myfoody was built for and I still don't always remember to use it myself. But this time I did. Stood in a car park somewhere between fields, no plan for dinner, I opened the app, picked butchers and farm shops, and it found two options within three miles. One of them looked interesting. I tapped directions and went to find out.
It turned out to be Wellington Farm Shop, and it was, without exaggeration, one of the best places I've stumbled into in a long time. The whole thing is beautifully done — rustic but properly clean and fresh, everything laid out with real care rather than just piled on a shelf. The main room had fridges and a butcher's counter stacked with genuinely good-looking produce, plus veg, bread, a wall of rubs, marinades and sauces, fresh pasta, cereals, and dairy that made me want to buy milk purely because of how it looked and was presented (I did not need more milk).
Through into the next room: gifts and a grab-and-go fridge — scotch eggs, sausage rolls, quiches, the lot. And then, through into a third room, a proper little dining hall doing hot food to eat in or take away, with a lovely outside seating area I'm already plotting to bring the family to (it's just far enough from home that I need a better excuse than "there's a good sandwich there").
Speaking of the sandwich — I'd been planning my usual stop for some equally-priced Waitrose sushi (which I do genuinely love), but instead had a chicken, bacon and avocado toasted sourdough from Wellington's counter. £12, which sounds like a lot for a sandwich until you eat it and realise it isn't really a sandwich in the normal sense — proper ingredients, generously done, the kind of thing you eat slowly. Worth every penny of the twelve pounds, and a very happy change from my usual order.
While I was working my way through it, my 19-year-old rang me — mid farm-shop-triumph — for emergency advice about flying ants in the house. I'm still not entirely sure what she expected me to do about this over the phone. What she really needs to be concerning herself with is getting a job than these minor emergencies she keeps encountering! She also has an uncanny radar for calling exactly when I'm stood at a butcher's counter, usually to request steak for dinner; this time she got honey chipotle chicken wings instead, which I will be sampling one of purely as quality-control research, obviously, for myfoody purposes only. I do love our shared enthusiasm for good food. She always wants to try new food/drink-related things. I've instilled this in her as we raised her. Its an expensive hobby when there's two of you though and only ever the one of you paying!
I also came away with: reduced black pudding for my mum (a tough Northerner who treats best-before dates as more of a suggestion, and any resulting dodgy stomach as pure coincidence); pork, cheese and marmite sausages for my wife, who loves marmite in a way I simply do not understand, except — mysteriously — in sausage form, where these original combos of odd ingredients usually somehow just work; a scotch egg, which is one of my personal tests of a good farm shop (soft yolk good, solid yolk merely fine — verdict pending until tomorrow's lunch test when I slice it open); some garlic and black pepper biltong for nibbling; and a honey and mustard chicken breast wrapped in bacon, now safely in the freezer stash.
None of this was planned. That's rather the point. I had zero idea Wellington Farm Shop existed an hour before I was standing in it, and I'd never have found it without opening the app and asking it what was nearby. That's the entire reason myfoody exists — not for the trips you plan, but for the ones you didn't know you could take. I'll be back to do a proper Producer Story on them soon. For now: if you're ever out near Reading with no plan for dinner, you know what to do.