Store Spotlight: Sprout Health Foods
Matt Chittock speaks with Sebastian Venn, co-founder of Sprout Health Foods, about how an off-the-beaten-track shop has become a cornerstone of Newquay’s changing high street – reflecting a town shifting from seasonal tourism to a year-round, health-conscious community.
If you wanted a symbol of how Newquay has changed in the last 20 years, you couldn’t do better than the success of Sprout Health Foods. The site the store now stands on used to be a dilapidated ‘private’ shop with XXX fare aimed squarely at tourists looking for cheap thrills. But thanks to a wholesale transformation from owners Sebastian and Claire Venn, it’s now a flourishing independent health store and café open to everyone in this sought-after seaside town.
“Before us, there hadn’t been a health food shop in Newquay for at least 12 years, so there was a real gap in the market,” Sebastian explains. “The town has changed a lot. There used to be more of a focus on nightlife – but now it’s more prosperous and has become a desirable place to live for families, which lends itself much more to health food shoppers.”
“From the moment we opened, we’ve always tried to be very much as inclusive and approachable as possible”
The shop itself is in a beautiful, traditional Cornish building set ten metres off the high street in a quiet little lane. This means customers actively seek it out, rather than it being another stop on the tourist trail for visitors wanting to while away an afternoon.
“From the moment we opened, we’ve always tried to be very much as inclusive and approachable as possible,” Sebastian says. “Our customers do tend to be locals rather than holidaymakers. They’re very much healthy and active people of all ages in a town where we get surfers, runners, coastal path walkers and sea swimmers.”
The team at Sprout works hard to connect with the local community through a lively events programme – including leading a monthly local run to raise money for a dementia charity. Plus, there’s plenty of dedicated foodie events in the store’s courtyard. The Christmas Market in particular has become an annual tradition, with food from the shop’s café, carol singers and mulled wine.
Food destination
The café element is a vital part of Sprout’s proposition and has become a local food destination. “What we offer is delicious, plant-based wholefoods that are majority gluten-free,” Sebastian says. “We are passionate about avoiding highly processed food – which means cooking everything from scratch.”
Particularly popular are the refined sugar-free vegan cakes and ‘Sprout Pots’ – reasonably priced one-pot meals. As Sebastian notes: “When people want an alternative to a Boots’ meal deal, they can come in and grab something healthy, like chilli and curry pots served with rice and our gluten-free flatbread.
“My partner Claire is coeliac, and we know there’s a growing need for gluten-free food in the local area, which also differentiates ourselves from other places. Staff in other cafés often send customers to us because we cater for gluten-free.”
The natural next step is for the store to produce its own packaged food lines from its kitchen – and the team is set to develop these throughout 2026.
Food and drink is also a solid category in store, Claire noticing a rising interest in innovative drink-based supplements from brands like Cheerful Buddha and Torquay’s Cacao Temple, alongside forward-thinking alcohol-free lines. “Alcohol alternatives that are different from the supermarkets’ are always big for us,” says Sebastian. “It’s products that are harking back to herbal elixirs of the past, like Botivo.”
Despite a prime coastal location, the community faces similar challenges to towns elsewhere in the UK, like the ongoing cost-of-living crisis. “Our take on that is to remind people that living healthily doesn’t have to be expensive,” Sebastian points out. “One thing we do is share our recipes that we cook in the café. We make them available to customers because they’re generally made from affordable staples and wholefoods ingredients.”
By Matt Chittock, acting editor