Our priority is to ensure the health and safety of everyone at Essential, our customers, suppliers and the wider community. We are following all relevant guidance issued by public health professionals. Essential workers are complying with strict hygiene and social distancing protocols including increased cleaning and hygiene routines in our premises and vehicles.
It is clear that we are constantly having to review our service at short notice as circumstances and the advice we all receive changes. We are still experiencing unprecedented demand for our service as a consequence of changing consumer habits connected to Coronavirus, and whilst we are doing everything we can to meet this demand we have to make some changes now.
With safety our foremost priority, we have to make the following unprecedented operational decision in order to allow vital food supplies to reach as much of the general public as possible, whilst eliminating contact in accordance with government advice. We will therefore only be making deliveries to our regular core existing independent retail shops until further notice. This will cut the amount of drops our drivers need to do whilst maintaining supplies of food items to end consumers. If you have not ordered from us for some time or have not ordered regularly, or are not a retail shop, please do not place an order or try to contact us, as unfortunately we will not be able to process your order at the current time.
We have also made the decision to not deliver to the London area with our own vehicles at present. We will let you know when we will be able to resume other areas of our service in further updates.

Deliveries
Limiting contact when we deliver you order is imperative as it will help keep everyone healthy, so the ideal option is to forklift your order off, alternatively our drivers will be leaving your delivery at the door of your premises, they will knock and will ask for a name of the person receiving the delivery, but will not require a signature and would ask that you observe the social distancing guidance of staying at least 2 metres away. We will refuse delivery if these sensible social distancing protocols are not observed.

Supply Chain
You may notice shortages of some products while we catch up with these exceptional changes in demand. We are in constant contact with our suppliers and ask for your patience during these very challenging times.

Orders for Collection
We have made the business decision to close our collection service from our warehouse at this time. This is to protect our staff and customers and to ensure that we can continue to operate as safely as possible.

Payments
To reduce risk and ensure business continuity, we are asking customers, where possible to pay by BACS, Sagepay (retained card details) or via our website; choose Portal when you sign in. To set up Sagepay please email our account department, providing your customer code and a contact number we can call you back on.

New Business
We are currently not able to process applications for any new business due to the exceptionally high number of trade enquiries we are receiving. We hope to be in a position to resume dealing with trade applications soon.

We thank you for your patience and understanding during these exceptionally challenging times.

All at Essential Trading Co-operative.