Pre-orders for Isles of Scilly producers

Scilly runs on two rhythms that pull against each other. Freight arrives on set days — Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday — carrying supplies for shops and restaurants aboard vessels like the Gry Maritha. Meanwhile roughly 100,000 visitors compress demand into a short summer, in an economy where tourism and farming together make up around 80% of annual income.

Three delivery days, no second chances

A mainland supplier who under-orders can usually fix it the same afternoon. On Scilly, a shortfall on Tuesday waits until Thursday. That asymmetry pushes businesses toward over-ordering, and over-ordering perishable stock in a place with no easy secondary market is simply waste with extra freight cost attached.

Ordering against a published cut-off, timed to the freight day, replaces that hedge with a number. Island growers — the market gardens on St Martin's and elsewhere selling everything they produce locally — can harvest against confirmed demand rather than an estimate of how busy the week will feel.

Seasonality is the other half

Demand doesn't just vary week to week here, it transforms between seasons. Slots handle that naturally: each one carries its own product list and its own deadline, so a quiet March offer and a peak-August one are simply different slots rather than a system to reconfigure.

• Cut-offs aligned to freight days — Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, or whatever your run is.
• Season-by-season availability, since each slot has its own product list.
• One consolidated list across every hotel, restaurant, café and shop.
• Invoice terms for trade accounts.
• Inter-island runs managed as separate slots with their own delivery dates.

For flower and produce growers shipping out

The same mechanism works outbound. Scilly has shipped flowers to the mainland since the 1860s, and any grower sending product off-island can publish a slot, collect orders against it, and dispatch a pre-sold consignment rather than a speculative one.