30 | The Grocer | 20 July 2019 Get the full story at thegrocer.co.uk
reported sales of £49m, and a pre-
tax loss of £261k.
The store sells a colourful array of
Asian fruit & veg such as rambutan,
dragonfruit, daikon and sinqua.
It also sells a huge selection of
dry ingredients, fresh and frozen
foods, sauces, meals, puddings and
cooking ingredients from across
Asia, including some that it man-
ufactures itself at a factory in Park
Royal, London.
The store itself has tanks full of
live eels, crabs, crayfish and lob-
sters for sale in its seafood section.
It also claims to be the first retailer
to import pak choi into the UK.
The retailer has diversified
its range to include groceries
from other Asian countries as
well as China, such as Thailand
and Vietnam, to meet customer
demand.
Through its wholesale arm,
SeeWoo supplies almost all of the
89 restaurants in Chinatown.
world supermarkets
Wing Yip
Wing Yip is reputedly
the UK’s biggest Chinese
supermarket, with four
stores with a combined
annual turnover of
£110m in Birmingham,
Manchester, Cricklewood
and Croydon, as well
as an e-commerce
operation. It was founded
in 1970 and stocks 4,500
products available to the
trade and public.
The shop stocks
Chinese, Thai, Japanese,
Korean, Vietnamese
and Indian ranges in
its stores, including dry
ingredients, fresh fruit
& veg, simple sauces,
and fresh meat and fish
counters, complete with
trained butchers.
The company also has
warehouse facilities for
trade customers, with
wide aisles, packing
teams and bulk volumes.
Wing Yip continues
to grow, with ongoing
expansion plans. A
few years ago, Wing
Yip refurbished its
Birmingham head office,
warehouse and national
distribution centre with
almost 200,000 sq ft of
selling and storage space
across the 10-acre site.
The Croydon and
Manchester stores
are also undergoing
transformation, in an
effort to offer improved
shopping facilities with
an even greater range of
Far Eastern products.Red Rickshaw
Red Rickshaw is an online Indian
grocery store that has been around
since 2016. Founder and CEO Jyoti
Patel started up the company as a
side-project while working full time
in finance. However, the business
took off, and now claims to be the
UK’s largest online Asian grocer.
The idea behind the launch was
to make Asian ingredients “more
accessible” – not just shelf-stable
products like spices, but authentic,
fresh groceries that for many peo-
ple are very difficult to come by, like
fresh curry leaves, alphonso man-
goes and white radishes.The business has now branched
out into three core areas – Red
Rickshaw, a Red Rickshaw whole-
sale service, which counts Michelin-
starred restaurants among its
clients, and home delivery recipe
box brand Feast Box.
It delivers to thousands of cus-
tomers across the UK each month,
and has a small team, spread across
its London office and its warehouse.
The company also has its own
van fleet, which delivers wholesale
goods every week to restaurants,
street food stalls, hotels, catering
companies and dark kitchens.
“We’re opening up the Asian gro-
cery market to a wider audience,”
says Patel.
“Especially with wholesale,
we offer unbeatable expertise in
authentic Asian ingredients, plus
a full service that can meet our cli-
ents’ other needs. This makes us
distinctly useful to our non-Asian
restaurant clients.”