Cafe

Welcome to the Real Food Store café!

The Real Food Store café is a popular venue with a friendly atmosphere, good service and great food! Our aim is to serve tasty, simple & exciting seasonal food.

The Cafe Menu, our coffee, our approach to making the most of food

Café opening times

Monday – Friday: 09.00 – 17.00
Saturday: 10.00 – 16.30

The main café is upstairs, above the store and is a big, open and airy space flooded with natural light. We can seat 60 at any time. Just choose a table and come to the counter to order from the menu.

Kelly our talented and creative cook rustles up superb daily specials & makes the most of her ingredients, all from the store downstairs! The aim is to provide you with meals that are wholesome and enjoyable and- connect you to high quality local produce that is in season. If you like what has just tingled your taste buds and satisfied your stomach you can shop for the same ingredients downstairs in the store!

Ask us for preparation and cooking tips and please pass on to us any of your favourite recipes or family traditions. We will try to add them to our recipe collection & feature them in-store and on the website.

Children are always very welcome, please choose from the menu and simply request a half portion. We have a mix of chairs and our funky 'pop' chairs (the green and grey ones) are ideal for children; we also have a couple of booster seats for little ones. There are 2 baskets of toys and books to keep children occupied. Please ask for scrap paper if your children want to draw.

The Real Food Store Café Menu

Breakfast- served between 9 & 11.30 am includes:

Toast, from a selection of Emma's bread
Midfields granola
Open toasties (try it with wilted spinach and tasty cheddar topped with 2 poached eggs- delicious!)

Snacks- served all day includes:

Real Food sandwiches, salads and seasonal soups
Emma's toasted teacake
Emma's Devonshire split served with Shute fruit strawberry jam and Devon clotted cream

Light lunches- served from 12 pm include:

Real Food sandwiches, salads and seasonal soups
Daily specials, written up on blackboard daily

Beverages- served all day including:

Coffees, from black Americano to latte & macchiato Made with 'Farmer 30' coffee, a superb top quality 100% Arabica bean coffee supplied by Origin Coffee, coffee buyers and roasters in Helston, Cornwall. We serve our regular coffees with one shot of coffee, please do ask for a second shot if you like your coffee strong!
Teas, a selection of loose leaf teas supplied by Suki Teas
Hot chocolate
Soft drinks, featuring Sandford Orchards fruit juices, Luscombe Organic drinks & Whole Earth organic sparkling drinks
Wines, ales and ciders

More about Origin Coffee

'Farmer 30' is Origin's own certification system based on financial, social and environmental factors. It means that when Origin are happy with the level of care that the coffee farms provide for their workers, their families and the environment, they agree on a price that guarantees the farmer a 30% profit margin. This delicious, subtle and flavoursome coffee is grown in El Salvador and Nicaragua where it is also washed, fermented, dried, rested & milled. The green beans are then shipped to Origin who expertly roast them, in small batches using an environmentally responsible method. The Real Food Store is really pleased to be working with Origin; we share their driven enthusiasm for good coffee and we make sure our staff get their barista training from Origin in order to make the best coffee possible. Read more about Origin and the fascinating story of coffee.

At the Real Food Store we believe in getting the most out of food & keeping waste to a minimum- here is some food for thought:

Making the most of food: making good sense & less waste!

At the Real Food Store we aim for zero food waste. Because the store and the café work closely together we get pretty close to this. Why is food waste an important issue? Did you know:

In the UK we throw away a third of the food we buy: 6.7 million tonnes a year
That includes 1.2 million sausages & 4.4 million apples per day!
Most of this food ends up in landfill and produces greenhouse gases as it decomposes
Much of this food 'waste' is still in date
The average UK household throws away over £500 worth of food a year

So what is the Real Food Café doing about it?

Kelly, our talented and creative cook shops for all her ingredients at - you've guessed! The Real Food Store. She keeps a beady eye on:

Vegetables that are beginning to lose their freshness but still fabulous if cooked up
Sell by dates & use by dates on e.g. our range of dairy products and meats, making sure they are used in time

Then the cook and the staff team:

Make the most of what's available, adapting a favourite recipe or inventing a dish to use up ingredients
Plan the daily specials to take advantage of what is available (this could be an unexpected fabulous ingredient!)
Just shop for what is needed to avoid an excess of ingredients
Prepare & freeze excess ingredients (e.g. fruit compote)
Compost vegetable waste (e.g. peelings, unusable salad leaves etc). We also compost the paper napkins
Put bread that is too old to use (not much ever gets to this point) aside for a friend who feeds it to his pigs
Bag up our coffee grounds for RFS customers to take home for their home composting
Always recycle all card, glass and plastic containers

You can apply your own genius to making the most of your food shopping and reducing your waste. We want to share our top tips about this topic including with recipes in-store- about how to cook simple and delicious meals for you, your friends and family that don't cost the earth. We want to put good food on your plate and not in landfill!