Food and Cycling - Keeping it local

At Saint Piran we like to keep things local. We started with a shop, and then with a ‘Shop team’, and we built from there, right up to the Saint Piran Pro Team racing in the higher tiers of international racing.  Click back through some of the other pages on this website (Our Story) and read the full story of where we started, where we went, and where we are going now. The same ‘local’ ethos applies to our workshop, and to our café.

The café feeds hundreds of thousands of people over a year, particularly in the summer with the Staycation tourists visiting Cornwall, but we also have a mainstay of locals who use the café as a hub all year round, and we want to showcase and use local produce as far as possible.  We don’t just use local, we use seasonal local, so if you can see it in the fields or greenhouses while you’re in Cornwall, there is every chance you’ll find it on one of our plates too.

We take a lot of produce from local suppliers or producers, most of them within a 10-15 minute (if you time it right) drive of the café.

We get our meat from Etherington’s, a local butcher who has been supplying the community and commercial partners since 1954; they are a 5-minute drive from the café. We use WestCountry for a lot of our produce, again another local company started in the late 50’s. They began life supplying ships in Falmouth and continue with their core of fresh produce while introducing various other product lines. Our bread comes from Baker Tom’s, another local success story producing some outstanding products. We now stock and serve Cornish Tea, another in-county producer that started small and built over the years,

On the more ‘fun’ side of the menu, some of our cakes are produced at the café, and some come from various local businesses like BB’s Bakery in Redruth, a father and daughter company who supply all our Gluten free cakes and traybakes.  If you need cream with your scones (and who doesn’t) then that comes from Roddas in Scorrier, and if you cycle the Coast to Coast from the café to Portreath, you’ll ride right past the factory.  Staying with dairy, the café’s ice-cream comes from Callestick Farm, another local producer within a 10-minute drive of the café. They’ve run the farm for three generations and have been producing ice-cream since the late 80’s.

Not far from Callestick is the Healy’s Cyder farm. They’ve been producing and supplying award winning cyder for over 30 years and were one of the major partners with the Saint Piran Pro Team.  We stock a great range of their products, whether your ‘drinking’ or on the alcohol free. Another local brewery and Race team partner are the St Austell Brewery, you’ll have seen their pints on taps right across the UK.  As a race team, we had both these suppliers showcased on our helmets, half green for Healy’s Rattler, half Purple for St Austell’s Tribute; we also had a matching, and eye-catching van.

So this is us; buy local, keep the food miles down and the local economy up. If you live down here or visit us then help us keep local businesses busy, and if you don’t, then look around you and support your local shop, cafes and suppliers.