Visitors spend tens of millions of pounds in restaurants in this Gloucestershire town

Efforts to showcase the food and drink sector in a Gloucestershire town are revealing a tantalising menu of exciting venues, and an economy worth tens of millions of pounds hidden in plain sight.

Dear readers,

We hope you had a great weekend. Welcome to the Monday edition of The Raikes Journal.

Last week our deep dive story into what it means to be a B Corp business did particularly well, which we like to think is a sign of our growing readership.

We’re being as counter-intuitive as possible in that respect, straying away from any news agenda, writing what we think is most interesting and looking to grow an audience not by aiming for as many clicks as we can, but by reaching people we think are important in our community.

We don’t just want to go to a launch event and write that ‘we’ve been to a launch event and that it was great’, we want to put it in some kind of context. Hopefully that is what we have done with the main article below.

It is built around the launch of this month’s Food and Drink Week in Cheltenham, but we wanted to look at the journey the town is on in terms of food and drink, who is driving it and why, and why it all matters. If you think the town has always had…