‘We believe that organic should be for everybody’
The family behind Yeo Valley are passionate about their farming methods. Boudicca Fox-Leonard reports
‘Milk?” asks Sarah Mead. I’m having a cup of tea with her and her husband, Tim, in their kitchen at Holt Farm. It’s by no means a simple question nowadays, as the Meads well know. Dairy is the family business, and Meads have been farming in Somerset for 500 years. More than 50 of those have been here, in the Yeo Valley, nestled between Chew Valley and the Mendips in Somerset, and for the past 40 they’ve been making yogurt too.
A lot has changed in that time. More than 135,000 dairy farmers have gone out of business. There are now only 15,000 left. Meanwhile, a quarter of Britons are drinking plantbased milks.
Yet Yeo Valley is that rare thing – a successful family business that is still privately owned and is doing extremely well. Turnover was £295million in the financial year 2017-18. Profits were £9.4 million before tax. It makes one million pots of organic yogurt every day, and employs
1,750 people.
This year, it has been celebrating 25 years of
Yeo Valley Organic, filling fridges around the country.
But I’m keen to know what’s in the Meads’ own fridge. Sarah looks stricken. It’s Asda British Farmers. Not organic. “That wasn’t me, that was you!” says her husband. “It wasn’t me, darling!” says Sarah. And then, both at once: “It was Dan.” Their son, one of their four children.
There’s also a carton of soya milk (Dan’s girlfriend is lactose intolerant), and, phew, Sarah pulls out, with a relieved smile, a large tub of Yeo Valley yogurt.
It’s not exactly the ideal scenario when you invite a journalist into your home, but it’s also hugely endearing. They are dedicated advocates of organic, but there’s nothing lofty and preachy about the Meads.
If organic brings to mind overpriced farmers’ markets, then Yeo Valley yogurt has prized itself on price – holding its own with bigger players on the supermarket shelves.
“We’ve gone out of our way to make that possible,” says Sarah. “No disrespect to farmers’ markets, but it’s not necessarily a healthy association with organic, in my view. Organic should be for everybody.”
It’s what they’ve spent the past 25 years working towards, what the Meads call their “True North”: helping to make 10 per cent of dairy farming in the UK organic.
“You might say, ‘What the hell have you been doing for the past 25 years?’ Well, we’ve been trying to get to a billion litres. We’re halfway there, but if you believe in exponential curves it might not take another 25 years,” laughs Tim.
He says if four million people bought three Yeo Valley products every week, that would create the demand for a billion litres of organic milk.
The 2008 financial crisis, though, was catastrophic for organic, with Tesco in particular cutting its organic ranges. Yeo Valley lost 40 per cent of its retail distribution points.
This is partly why, in recent years, Yeo has chosen to emphasise that its products are made
Yeo Valley has been producing with milk from British farmers, rather than its solid organic credentials. The past 18 months, however, during which there has been a palpable shift towards environmental awareness, has boosted confidence in celebrating the company’s way of farming.
It’s obviously hugely exciting for the Meads. “We’re saying, for the first time ever, we think our method of farming might be a better way forward. And that’s quite brave because we are part of a bigger farming community that we’ve always supported,” says Sarah, 55.
Tim is passionate and well-informed across a range of farming issues: milk quotas, the common agricultural policy and the European Union. There’s a lot to talk about: how shocking it is that the UK has the third cheapest food in the world (“Milk was 22p a litre 50 years ago, and it’s 44p a litre now – it should be £2.90 a litre in real terms”); the “hijacking” of veganism by corporate brands (“Danone spent £10billion buying WhiteWave, which owns Alpro across Europe”), but it all comes back down to one thing for him, nature.
He is crazy about soil health. For him, that means grass-fed cows (rather than soya fed) that fertilise the soil in turn with their manure. “We rotate our grassland around our arable land, fixing nitrogen into the ground,” he says.
If you’re unconvinced about the merits of organic, then Tim says: “If you think something that’s been sprayed 32 times and doused in chemicals is good for you, you’ve got to be out of your tree.”
While organic farming hasn’t grown as fast as he would have liked, it’s influenced huge tracts of conventional farming. “The mixed herbal leys that are being put in, the amount of clover. The knowledge that you are using gets spread across the whole of the sector,” says the 56-year-old. Equally, he welcomes the focus on veganism if it means we all consume less meat and, instead, favour bettercared-for, grass-fed animals. “That’s the outcome we’re after.” Plant-based milks have also increased how much people are willing to spend.
They invite questions from vegans about their business. “A usual one is: ‘What do you do with your male calves?’ The answer to which is: ‘We either eat them, or they go back into the herd’,” she says.
“If it’s a matter of emotion and ethics, like: ‘How could you?’ then there’s no response to that. The answer is that we’ll have to agree to differ, but that’s OK.”
Currently, the Yeo Valley business has four manufacturing sites in the West Country, two distribution centres and a head office. It has 2,000 acres with two dairy herds.
“We rear beef, we have a flock of sheep and we grow most of the arable crops for the dairy cows – things like oats and barley and wheat,” says Tim.
The rest of the milk comes from 100 other organic farms. It’s an eclectic group, says Tim; from tenancy farmers who’ve been to agricultural college and are putting their all into it, to those who are organic by default, having never quite caught the pesticide wave of the Eighties and Nineties. And then there are those who’ve got so much money that they’ve bought an estate and thought it would be marvellous to be organic. And there’s room for more.
Last year, Danish milk giant Arla acquired Yeo Valley Dairies Limited, a subsidiary of the Yeo Valley Group Limited. It gave the farmer-owned dairy co-operative the rights to use the Yeo Valley brand in milk, butter, spreads and cheese – all made with the Meads’ organic milk, and according to their ethos – under an intellectual property licence.
While Yeo has eight per cent of the yogurt market, their share of the organic milk was only two per cent. The Meads say it would have taken them significant investment, around £100million, to develop that area of the business. It was a risk they were loath to take at the expense of the rest of the company. It’s part of the catch-22 that smaller businesses face. “Bigger brands can take more risks. That’s why private businesses continue to sell out,” says Tim.
Against the odds, Yeo Valley has remained a family business (his 83-year-old mother, Mary, is still active in the business; his father, Roger, died in a tractor accident in 1990), holding its own on the supermarket shelves among multi-billion-pound players like Onken, Müller and Danone. The cosy-looking Rachel’s organic range, by the way, is now owned by Nestlé.
“People look at us and say, ‘Christ, you’re a really big company, you’ve made it!’ But we are a very small fish in a big pond,” says Tim.
To that end, and to further its True North organic mission, Yeo has opened a café in west London, as well as encouraging visitors to its celebrated Yeo Valley headquarters canteen in Blagdon and the tea room at Holt Farm, open during spring and summer, where they can also explore Sarah’s certified organic ornamental garden. Each July, the Meads hold a music and food festival. They want people to come down and ask questions.
“As a family, and as a brand, we haven’t stuck our head above the parapet very much. We’ve relied on people liking the product. But we’ve taken the decision to try to get people to come here and see that it is real stuff for themselves,” says Sarah. “We’re certainly not perfect, but we’re doing our best, and it’s not elitist. It’s for everybody.”
‘We rotate our grassland around our arable land, fixing nitrogen into the ground’