2020 Targets

We are always striving to improve Bowhouse and the market weekends to continue our success as one of Scotland’s most well attended and loved indoor markets.

Bowhouse first opened its doors in July 2017 and has gone from strength to strength since, however running such a large scale market comes with a lot of responsibility, from the staff who help make the market run smoothly, the traders that attend and the public that come from across the country we all have a responsibility in ensuring the continued success of Bowhouse. Looking forward we are setting ourselves some very challenging targets.

We have a variety of goals that we will be working towards and ensuring the sustainability of Bowhouse as a food and drink hub. Each of these goals has a different target however we hope that everyone involved in Bowhouse will be a part of the change.

1. Data collection
2. Zero waste
3. Series of other food and drink events out with the market weekend

Data Collection

Although a high footfall through the door is a great achievement, we want to find out more about who we are attracting to the market, what they are buying, when they are buying it and why they have chosen to shop in this way. These topics can be asked in a series of questions to the public as well as gathering information from our traders. We feel it is important to gather this information to understand what our modern day Bowhouse buyers are doing and looking for so we can make decisions based around the information we have gathered.

In 2020 we will be introducing a data sharing project which will be open to any trader that is interested in taking part. This will involve sending through certain data after attending a market weekend at Bowhouse and in return we will also be sharing our own data such as our monthly footfall, how much a market costs to run and the data we collect from other traders at each market you take part in – all data will be anonymous though so no traders can be identified.

As part of this project we will also be offering a 10% discount that can be used against the next market the trader attends in 2020.

Zero Waste

It’s one of the biggest issues in our modern day and we are all rightly becoming increasingly aware of our impact that we as individuals and businesses are having on our environment. In 2019 we worked with Zero Waste Scotland to monitor our waste and the different ways we can look to reduce, reuse and recycle. We implemented our first recycling station and through a few trial months we are pleased to say that we will now be rolling out further recycling stations throughout Bowhouse and gradually eliminating our general waste bins. We will continue to encourage that all traders must take home their waste to be recycled when recycling at Bowhouse is not possible. Traders waste disposal will be monitored at Bowhouse and recycling will be enforced if waste disposal is necessary on site.

We will also be ambitiously looking to eliminate our single use plastic from Bowhouse and will be working alongside traders and outside companies on the best way to do this with the aim of making Bowhouse single use plastic free by January 2021.

Food and Drink Events

The Bowhouse Market Weekends are our biggest events in each month and what we are currently best known for. Now we are looking to start telling the other stories at Bowhouse. We would like Bowhouse to be known as the food hub of fife with our market and core Bowhouse businesses and producers being at the heart of the development.  We are looking into hosting a series of Supper clubs, dinners, production and farm tours and walks to encourage the local community to use Bowhouse to share and collaborate over food, drink and agriculture.

Leasing out Bowhouse as an event space to other key businesses such as any of the registered traders we have and other outside organisations will also be an important element to see Bowhouse grow. We will be continuously looking out for any events and ideas and welcome suggestions from anyone that feels they have an event that would fit in with the Bowhouse core values of community, seasonal and local food and drink, environmental sustainability, educational development and benefit the Fife and Scottish food and drink industry.