Up Close: Fillfull eco-friendly food and gift shop, Sidmouth

Just walking into Sidmouth's Fillfull shop is a treat for the senses. It's spacious and full of light, with a pale wooden floor, subtly tasteful décor, and colourful displays on the wooden walls and tables. Healthy green houseplants decorate the central display units, and there's a delicious smell – hard to identify, a mixture of all the natural, aromatic products and scented candles ranged around the shop.

Fillfull started out in Ottery St Mary as a zero waste store for buying food and eco-friendly household products. Customers could bring in their own containers – or buy reusable ones at the shop – and buy the products by weight, choosing as much or as little as they wanted.

That's still on offer at the Sidmouth shop, but there's also a wide range of high quality, sustainable gifts, toiletries, and home accessories on sale.

Owner Dan Prince, who opened up in Sidmouth in April, said: "It's a completely different market to Ottery – whereas Ottery is predominantly food with a few gifts, this is gifts with some food, and it will take time for the locals to get used to what we've got and bring their containers in."

Fillfull's most popular products

But some of the products have proved an instant hit with customers – and among them is the selection of vegan 'pick and mix' sweets, displayed in traditional glass jars on a circular table.

Dan said: "Vegan pick and mix has been brilliant. It's quite hard to get hold of unless you buy online, and then you've got to buy a kilo at a time, so it's nice for people to just come in and get what they want."

Another popular product range is the clocks that display not only the time, but the tide times and phases of the moon – perfect for a seaside town. And a selection of beautiful bowls and frames, made from recycled newspaper, has also been selling well.

Dan is also very pleased with the customer response to the creamy Jersey milk, produced by Taw Valley Dairy. The milk comes from pasture-fed Jersey cows, which are milked only once a day – and only after they've fed their calves. The milk is thick and pale gold in colour, and has a delicious flavour.

Lessons learned from previous Sidmouth shop

This is Fillfull's second time in Sidmouth – a branch opened in Cross Street at the end of 2019, but the premises were too small and Dan closed the shop four months later. The current store in Fore Street is a different story – the retail space is much bigger and the shop, with its attractive façade, a lot more visible.

With the shop relatively new, Dan said he and his staff are still learning, and they're always introducing new products. But after overcoming the difficulties of the pandemic, and with an increasingly enthusiastic customer base in Sidmouth, Fillfull is certainly becoming very fulfilling.