In 2020, three friends who'd just lost their jobs decided not to wait around. They opened a small greengrocer in Forest Hill, stacked it with the best fruit and veg they could get from British farms, and started knocking on doors. People liked it. Then people stuck indoors asked whether a box could come to them, and a delivery round was born almost by accident.
Six years later, Marvellous Greens & Beans is a proper fixture of the neighbourhood: a shop and coffee counter people actually stop and chat in, and a veg-box service that began on a few local streets and now reaches doorsteps across the UK. Along the way we've run produce assemblies in primary schools, handed out free fruit at theatres, and helped keep the local food banks stocked. We're proud of all of it.
We've now grown to the point where the business needs someone whose whole job is to run it brilliantly. That's where you come in.
Why we're hiring
Right now the founders are still doing a bit of everything, and "a bit of everything" stops working once you're spinning four plates at once. We have a shop, a coffee operation, a delivery business and an online store, and each one wants proper attention. We're looking for a General Manager to own the day-to-day so the whole thing runs tighter, the team is well looked after, and we can put our energy into growing the business rather than fire-fighting it.
This is a real ownership role, not a caretaking one. You'd hold operations, the P&L and the team, with the founders' full backing and the latitude to make it your own. It's a build-it job.
What you'd actually be running
- The floor and the coffee counter. Standards, service, stock, and the feel of the place when someone walks in. The bit customers see.
- The box and delivery operation. Fulfilment, routing and, above all, reliability. A veg box that turns up late or not at all is the quickest way to lose a good customer, so getting this consistently right is one of the biggest prizes in the job.
- The numbers. Full P&L responsibility. Fresh produce is a lovely business and a brutal one: margins are thin, stock goes off, and waste is the difference between a good month and a bad one. We need someone who reads a P&L like a story and knows which lever to pull.
- The team. Hiring the right people, training them properly, building the rotas, growing the good ones, and having the honest conversations when something isn't working. From a barista's first shift to a manager's appraisal, the people side is yours.
- Growth. Finding the next bit of revenue, whether that's new lines for the boxes, wholesale, partnerships or another site one day. We'll back good ideas, and we'd love some of them to be yours.
Who we're hoping to meet
Someone who has already run a real operation, with real money and real people behind them, ideally in food, retail or hospitality, where the days are long and the margins are tight. You're as comfortable on the shop floor at seven in the morning as you are in a spreadsheet at seven at night. You can look at a set of figures and see what's actually going on underneath them. You're good with people, the sort of manager others want to do well for. And you care about the things we care about: proper food, a shop that means something to its neighbourhood, and treating people decently.
You don't need to know a Pink Lady from a Braeburn on day one. You do need to want to.
Being straight with you
This is a hands-on job in a small, independent business, not a desk job with a department sitting behind every task. There are early starts and there are weekends. When it's chaos and a driver calls in sick, you'll be packing boxes yourself. There's no thick playbook waiting for you either; a lot of what makes this role good is that you'll get to write a fair bit of it. If that sounds like a headache, it isn't the job for you. If it sounds like exactly the right kind of challenge, keep reading.
What you get
A business people are genuinely fond of, and the room to make it better. Proper ownership, and the autonomy to go with it. A team and a community worth showing up for. [Salary £33,000 to £35,000 plus bonuses, based on experience], plus the obvious upsides: arguably the best coffee in SE23 and more fruit and veg than you can reasonably carry home. And the less obvious one — work that quietly does some good, from the school assemblies to the food banks.
Pay: £33,000.00-£35,000.00 per year
Benefits:
- Casual dress
- Discounted or free food
- Employee discount
- Free parking
- Store discount
Experience:
- Management: 1 year (preferred)
- Profit & loss: 1 year (preferred)
Work Location: In person
