The work starts
in the dark.
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 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
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
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.
This is not what people imagine when they hear "shared commercial kitchen."
It's a serious food production facility 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 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 learned formally.
Why this matters
for the product
There's a version of this business where ingredients get ordered through a supplier portal, delivered, and never touched until they're in the kitchen. That version is more efficient. It scales more easily. It removes a 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 picked 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. The answer isn't worth finding 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.