Nobody tells you this part of the job.
Not the cookbooks, not the food business courses, not the people who talk about artisan production with romantic language about craft and process. Nobody mentions that the work starts in the dark, in a wholesale market the size of several football pitches, while most of London is still asleep.
New Covent Garden Market opens before most of the city goes to bed. By 3am the trading floor is fully alive — refrigerated lorries reversing into loading bays, pallets of produce moving on forklifts, buyers walking the stalls with clipboards and torches. Restaurant suppliers. Supermarket buyers. Florists. And a handful of people like me, who are there because they're looking for something specific and won't find it anywhere else at this hour.
What I'm looking for
The carrot needs to be firm. Not just fresh — firm in a particular way that tells you the sugar content is right, that it hasn't been sitting in cold storage for three weeks, that it will hold up to fermentation rather than going soft on day two. I pick up a lot of carrots before I find the right one.
The cabbage needs to be dense. Heavy for its size. The outer leaves should be tight. If it feels loose, it's been losing moisture, and moisture is what we're working with. Loose cabbage makes a thin brine. We don't want a thin brine.
The blueberries for Ferment Blue need to be unwashed — which means I need to know exactly where they came from, because unwashed fruit carries its own wild bacteria, and the bacteria on the skin are part of what drives the fermentation. I ask questions at that stall that most buyers don't ask. The sellers there know me now.
None of this is something you can do from a supplier catalogue. You have to be there. You have to pick it up and feel it and sometimes put it back down.
The market itself
New Covent Garden relocated to its current site in Nine Elms in 1974, after 300 years at its original location in Covent Garden. The new market is enormous — over 57 acres, one of the largest wholesale markets in Europe. At 3am it's one of the few places in London where the scale of the city's food system becomes visible.
Every restaurant you've eaten at in London has probably received something from this market. The strawberries on your dessert, the herbs on your main course, the flowers on the table. It all moved through here, usually in the middle of the night, usually handled by people most diners will never think about.
I find this clarifying. Food has a supply chain that runs through darkness and cold and physical labour, and most of it is invisible by the time it reaches a plate. Being part of that chain — even a small part of it, even just walking the stalls at 3am looking for the right cabbage — changes how you think about what you're making.
Mission Kitchen
The walk from the market to Mission Kitchen takes about ten minutes. I carry everything myself. This is partly practical and partly intentional — I want to know the weight of what I'm bringing in, the smell of it, the temperature. By the time I'm unpacking at the kitchen, I already know what I have to work with.
Mission Kitchen is not what people imagine when they hear "shared commercial kitchen." It's a serious food production facility in Battersea, purpose-built for food businesses at the growth stage — the point between making things at home and having your own factory. The people working there are building real businesses. There are brands in that kitchen that are now on supermarket shelves nationally. The energy is different from what you'd find in a domestic kitchen or a hobby space. Everyone there is trying to make something work.
That matters. The environment you make food in affects how you think about making it. When the person at the unit next to you is solving the same problems you are — scaling a recipe, figuring out shelf life, working out cold chain logistics — you think differently about your own work. The conversations in that kitchen have been as useful as anything I've read or learned formally.
Why this matters for the product
There's a version of this business where I order ingredients through a supplier portal, have them delivered, and never touch the raw material until it's in the kitchen. That version is more efficient. It scales more easily. It removes a variable.
I don't want to remove that variable.
The decision to source at New Covent Garden is a decision about what the product is. It's a commitment to knowing the ingredient before it becomes a ferment. The carrot I pick up at 3am on a Tuesday is not interchangeable with a carrot delivered from a catalogue. Maybe the difference is invisible in the final jar. Maybe it isn't. I'm not willing to find out by doing it the other way.
Canbo doesn't have a supply chain. It has a market, a kitchen, and a very early alarm.
That's not a limitation. That's the point.