120-year-old Edinburgh store - Europe's oldest working health food shop - thriving due to TikTok trends
Watch the owner of Europe's oldest working health food shop - Hanover Healthfoods in Edinburgh - discuss the 120-year history of the store.
Europe's oldest working health food shop - located in Edinburgh - is thriving after 120 years due to TikTok trends.
Hanover Healthfoods on Hanover Street in Edinburgh has been in business since at least 1904. It is believed to be the first health food shop in Edinburgh and the oldest still in business in Europe - outlasting similar stores in Berlin and Birmingham.
When it opened the health food of the day were dried fruit, nuts, grains, flour and honey. Nowadays, the big sellers are often TikTok fueled and include Lion's Mane, turmeric and Ashwagandha probiotics.
Robert Ainslie, whose family had owned the business for 82 years, retired in 2015. The family left the business to current owner John, who started working at the shop part-time in 1994, while studying at university. Until recently, nobody knew how old the shop was - until John's research uncovered advertisements from Edinburgh newspapers dating back to 1909.
John said: "When I started working, my boss, Ainslie, didn't know how old the shop was. He knew his grandfather bought it in the early 30s. I went into the archives and the Central Library to work out how old it was - and it made me so aware of how good a business it has been for such a long period of time.
"We are the oldest business on Hanover Street - one of the oldest businesses in Edinburgh. We are pretty confident that we are the oldest surviving health food store in the world - certainly the oldest in Europe."
John began managing Hanover Healthfoods in 1998, and has overseen many changes in the business.
He said: "I started when I was a student as a Saturday job. I finished university and went full-time - then it just evolved. In 2015, my boss decided he was going to retire. He didn't have any family to pass it on to, so I tried to sell the shop on his behalf - but then I thought that made no sense whatsoever. By that point, I'd been there for 20 years and I was embedded really, so it just made sense for me to buy it."
John has noticed big changes in customer demands - with more people than ever before seeking supplements and superfoods advertised on social media.
He said: "In the beginning, it would have been unprocessed dried fruit, nuts, grains, flour, honey, and the beginnings of meat-free substitutes, along with some proprietary remedies for digestion and sleep. Brands like Kelloggs, Allinson and Bourneville would have been represented.
''Nowadays, functional mushrooms like Lion's Mane are popular, along with turmeric. Ashwagandha probiotics and essential fatty acids. While vegan products are still strongly represented, more people are asking for animal-based products like bone broth, collagen, ghee and tallow, which would definitely have surprised most of our customers from the early days.
"The recent trends are towards clean supplements and clean body care - and this is fuelled a lot by TikTok and Instagram. It seems to change by the week or by the month. Somebody on the internet tells them that A is bad, and then six months later, A is good again and B is bad. Our role is to filter out the internet noise and keep it real and honest, as opposed to chasing the trends."
John, who has now owned the business for over 10 years, says it is a "real triumph" to have a shop stand the test of time the way Hanover has.
He said: "If you look at your average Scottish city centre - Edinburgh in particular - there are very few independent businesses in them. The fact that we've managed to last since 1904 - I think it's a real triumph as to how good the business is.
“I think it's important for us to keep doing what we have done for the past century - that is what people want and are responding to. The thing that I'm proudest about is that we have people who have been shopping here for decades - and in some cases, over generations. When we turned 120, it turned out that one of our customers - who is 90 - is actually the third generation of her family to shop with us."