As yet another supermarket is planned for Western Road in Brighton, a new organisation is set to fight back against the takeover of the high streets. hiSbe, which stands for How It Should Be, is a social enterprise, set up by sisters Ruth and Amy Anslow at the beginning of the year. The aims are straightforward: to simplify issues for consumers and to provide access to affordable healthy food.

They intend to achieve this through two means. Firstly, a website and blog which highlight many of the issues around sustainable and healthy eating and, in particular, their “eight everyday choices” to help people make those difficult decisions. Their second course of action is to open a food shop to allow people to buy all their ethical, sustainable groceries in one location.

Given that Brighton and Hove is home of the locally-sourced organic biodynamic free-range lentil, it perhaps doesn’t sound all that radical.

Amy says, “There is nothing in the middle between the high-end organic food shops and supermarkets – and we think there should be. Good food should be affordable and accessible to people. We won’t be able to compete with the likes of Iceland but we think we can compete with Tesco or Asda.”

It’s a bold claim, but Amy says the assumption that supermarkets are always cheaper is largely down to marketing and obfuscation.

She says, “It’s drummed into us by advertising but the reality is, when you do a like-for- like comparison on a lot of produce from supermarkets, farmers’ markets or independent stores, there isn’t always a huge price differential. In a lot of cases it’s cheaper. You’ll never get ethically-produced meat and dairy as cheap as supermarket meat and dairy but we used to eat meat once a week; now people eat it three times a day and we’ve created an unsustainable industry around it.”

She points to the example of the People’s Supermarket in Bloomsbury, London, which sells tomatoes at 75p a kilo (with a healthy profit margin) compared with the “Big Four” (Asda, Morrisons, Sainsbury’s and Tesco) who sell at £1.50.

Ruth also points out that a recent study by charity Action For Children showed that travel to out of town supermarkets added 23% to the food budget of low-income families. “And then you won’t find the good deals on fresh food – it’s all about fizzy pop, crisps and ready meals.

“There’s an assumption that those on lower incomes should be forced to eat rubbish food. There’s now a pretty strong case showing the detrimental impact of eating that kind of stuff for a generation or two.”

The sisters initially quit their jobs for a year – Amy was a community youth worker and Ruth worked in sales and marketing for large multinationals – in order to give hiSbe a fair chance of working.

Having come this far, both are convinced that by the end of 2011, they won’t be returning to office work, instead dedicating their time to the pursuit of healthy and accessible sustainable food. They already have a site in mind for their first store and are currently negotiating a lease.

* For more information, visit www.hisbe.co.uk