The family who put the (welly ) boot into Irn-Bru!
From milk round to million-sellers – how a business built around a farmhouse kitchen table replaced the nation’s best-known fizzy drink as the most valuable brand in Scotland
AFEW years ago, after a series of board meetings around the kitchen table, the Grahams decided that the family business could benefit from some rebranding.
From now on, they agreed, three pairs of Wellington boots would appear on the packaging of every product they sold. The wellies, different sizes, styles and colours, may not at first seem the most alluring device for selling food and drink. They may lack the wallop, for example, of ‘Made in Scotland from girders’.
But the Grahams believed the footwear told the story they wanted to tell: This is a family business; everyone mucks in, there are no airs and graces – just honest toil down on the farm.
Evidently the story met with customers’ approval. Graham’s The Family Dairy has just emerged as Scotland’s number one food and drink brand, eclipsing even the mighty IrnBru, which had held the top spot for decades.
Such is the ubiquity of the company’s products that 70 per cent of Scottish households now buy them. If you live in Scotland and have a fridge then there is a seven in ten chance there will be at least one product in there with a picture of the Grahams’ wellies on it.
All of which would surely have come as something of a surprise to the family’s original Wellington boot wearer, Grandpa Graham, who started off with 12 cows to milk in 1939.
Back then, of course, the delivery round was less extensive than today. A pony would pull a milk churn around Bridge of Allan, in Stirlingshire, and Robert Graham’s customers would collect their milk from it with a jug.
Today there is a fleet of 180 lorries, many of them 40-ton articulated trucks, delivering dairy products throughout the UK. Some 120,000 cows contribute to the production process, employee numbers are almost 700 and the latest annual sales figure is £109million.
And yet, insist the unassuming family members who still dine together often, despite now forming three separate households, the essence of the business is unchanged in 81 years. It is still a family concern based at the same farm, operating out of the same farmhouse – albeit it is mostly offices today – and everyone still does a bit of everything.
‘I feel slightly uncomfortable with titles,’ admits managing director Robert Graham Jnr, 49, who took up his post in 1996 when his father, also Robert, moved to chairman.
‘We’re just here to run a family business and do the best we can for our customers, our farmers and our colleagues. And, because we’re a family business, we know how to muck in and get things done.’
NOR does his older sister, marketing director Carol, dwell overmuch on demarcation and job descriptions. She was the prime mover behind the rebranding exercise of 2006, when the Grahams decided to put their own family story front and centre of the business.
The genius of the strategy is that every word of it is true. It is not only for publicity shots and the homespun TV ads showing the Grahams at the kitchen table tucking into their ice cream that the family gets together. They see each other every day.
Father Robert and daughter Carol share an office in the farmhouse where it all started. Indeed, their desks are in Grandpa Graham’s former bedroom. Robert Jnr’s office is in what was his dining room.
‘Although we have board meetings with non-execs and so on, a lot of decisions are made when it is just the four of us and we’ll decide to bring out a new product – often when we’re at the kitchen table,’ Carol says.
It soon becomes clear, in fact, that the kitchen table is the backbone of Graham family life – and that the traditions it represents hold an instinctive appeal for Scots shoppers.
Carol recalls: ‘The one thing that always happened even though Mum was looking after the shops and the family and Dad was looking after the dairy business and the farm, we always had tea together. Dad would be going back out to the farm after tea, but we always had tea together.’
She clearly remembers the day of her brother’s 21st birthday party, when the family returned home in their finery after midnight. Moments later her father was changing into his old clothes to go out on the farm and pasteurise the milk.
Had she not realised it before, she saw it clearly then. A work ethic ran through the family business and had done from the beginning. It was both noble and, as it turned out, highly marketable.
Her brother tells similar stories about his Grandpa, the founder of the business, who carried on working well into his 80s.
‘He was a fit man,’ he says. ‘I remember him counting the money coming off the milk floats. All the milk vans used to be parked in a shed and he would park each one in there every night and then bring them out in the morning, even into his 80s.’ Both
Carol and Robert are old enough to remember when the business was hardly known outside Stirlingshire.
Summer holidays were spent in tractors carting around hay bales or, in Carol’s case, helping in one of the small supermarkets the Grahams decided to open as customers started to cut back on doorstep deliveries.
As he grew older, Robert also started going on milk runs around Stirling and Falkirk and, later, Perth, too.
‘I still remember our first sevenand-a-half ton lorry, which I thought was amazing,’ he says. ‘Now we’ve got about 180 lorries and when I see a seven-and-a-half ton one, which is the smallest you can buy, I go, “Why have we got any of these now?”.’
Yet, despite all the hours they put into the business while growing up, neither one imagined they would be working for it as adults. Still less did their parents expect them to.
‘I actually think my mum and dad pretty much fell over when I turned up after university,’ says Robert. ‘They just were really surprised.
‘There was no master plan around it and it was certainly a change from being a student to being up at four in the morning and working in the dairy, but it was something that I enjoyed.’
And so, having expected their son to pursue another line entirely, Robert Snr and wife Jean, the company secretary, began making plans with the young accountancy graduate to drive the business forward.
Not that anyone seriously expected Graham’s to become a household name, to be spoken of in the same breath as stalwart Scottish brands such as Tunnock’s, Baxters or Barr’s Irn-Bru.
No, until now, Graham’s was primarily a doorstep business delivering in Stirlingshire and bolstered by a couple of local grocery stores.
Not until the 1990s did it start delivering to hotels, restaurants and cafes and only in 1999 did Graham’s win its first nationwide supermarket contract. Incredibly, butter did not appear in its range of products until as late as 2003, by which time sister Carol had joined the family firm, too.
‘I never thought I’d go into the business,’ she says. ‘And Mum and Dad never had any expectation on either Robert or me to go into it.
‘But by that point the business was growing and Robert asked me if I’d ever thought about coming into it.’
SO the family team was complete and, within a few years, the new marketing strategy devised. Going forward, there would be no place for camera shyness in promoting the growing roster of Graham products.
The family – mother, father, son and daughter – were to be the four faces of the business.
‘All the family came on board,’ says Carol, ‘but back then it was a really big decision for us.
‘It was a big investment and it involved explaining to Dad and Mum that, actually, if we get it right and we create a brand it really could make a big difference in sales.’
A decade and a half on, there seems little question they got it right. Indeed, as even their competitors would surely acknowledge, it was a masterstroke. Carol says: ‘When the
welly boots came on to the packaging that was quite different at the time because a lot of other dairy brands were using a milk splash and very generic images, whereas what we were trying to portray was it was from our family to your family. That’s what the welly boots signified.
‘We’re family – they were three different sizes – we’re farming and one of the pairs is tartan, so we’re Scottish.’
She adds: ‘I guess in everything we try to do – even our TV adverts
– it involves the family. It’s not actors or anything like that; it’s all family members. It’s Dad that does the voiceover or me at the end of the shot. It’s at our farm; it’s with our Jersey cows.’
Thus the true story, rather than gimmicks or hyperbole, proved the way to their customers’ hearts. So the tale of Grandpa Graham and the meagre resources he started off with in 1939 is rehearsed often.
‘We’re a business that has its roots in my grandfather milking 12 cows and delivering milk by horse and cart,’ says father-of-three Robert Jnr. ‘A particular set of values come from that and continued on to my Dad and my sister and me.
‘One of those is hard work. We work hard as a family and our teams work hard. So that’s a kind of backbone of the business.
‘We make natural and healthy products that consumers trust. And we particularly saw that trust in lockdown.’
Indeed, it may well be in the six months or so since coronavirus reached UK shores that Graham’s
The Family Dairy finally nudged ahead of Irn-Bru in shoppers’ affections.
A surge in the popularity of home baking saw sales of their butter soar by 400 per cent at a time when rivals from overseas were struggling to supply supermarkets.
Shrewdly, the business mobilised delivery teams to take milk, cream and butter to customers unable or afraid to leave their homes.
‘The conscious thought from everyone in the business was wanting to make sure that we were putting dairy products on the shelves, that they would not be found empty,’ says Robert Jnr. Thus, when the chips were down, the family-run dairy resolved to be the business customers could rely on. On such criteria, it figured, lifelong shopping habits may be formed. It typically takes shoppers less than a second to choose which brand of milk to buy, says Carol – and less than two seconds to choose other dairy products such as ice cream, cottage cheese, yoghurt or kefir, which is a cultured, fermented milk drink.
IN the crowded marketplace where the family competes to sell all of those products and more, then, it helps if customers can spend those brief moments associating Graham’s with words such as trust, provenance, family and heritage. But there could be one final explanation why Graham’s has, at last, pipped Irn-Bru as Scots’ favourite homegrown grocery brand. Robert Jnr’s daughter Holly, 14, has ordered her 79-year-old ‘Papa’ not to drink the Barr’s product any more.
Her father says: ‘She said to him, “If we’re ever going to overtake Irn-Bru, Papa, you need to stop drinking it”. He generally does what she says.’
Clearly, the fourth generation values the Graham brand as keenly as the first three.