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In 2007
when most of the UK's dairy farms were suffering from price wars in
supermarkets
Cliff House Farm, sat a stone's throw from Sheffield, made a radical
decision
as well as delivering milk fresh from the cows daily, Our Cow Molly ice cream
has gained eminence across the region. At that time we were, er,
for every litre of milk produced we lost one pence on
so we would be better letting all that milk go down the drain
but because you've spent years building up your dairy herd from ten cows
to eighty cows now and you just kind of think
that oh, you know, it'll, the prices will change and it'll get going again but it
is kinda, the thing is, as a country we import over a million litres of milk
every single day it can come from France and Holland you know, straight through the tunnel
you can be in in France the same-day its
it's not a difficult thing to ship in
and there's now 10,000 dairy farms like us
left in the UK, and every single day one closes. The fact that
we produce ice cream and we deliver milk direct to customers
kinda makes us a little bit more sustainable. The farm is popular with
adults and children who as well as
being able to get ice cream there can have a look around and see how a real dairy
farm works
I mean, people got to see
lambs being born and calves being born, its just what happens when they are here
they get to see the food being put out for the cows
I mean there's nothing kinda staged and we're a million miles away from the
petting zoo.
The cows are
next door being milked
the milk now comes through this pipe into this tank here
and then comes out of the tank, through this pipe along here straight
into the dairy, so shortly
the milk, the cartons that are being filled in the dairy are taken down
and we're straight into Sheffield. So its literally from the cow straight to the customers!
See you later!
We got an offer from the Spar and they said that
they'd like to stock our ice cream in every single Spar in Sheffield,
I think its about seven or eight outlets,
branches, but they wanted to have it exclusively to them and they didn't
want us to supply
anybody else. They were talking about how it was a great opportunity for our little business
and all that kind of nonsense
and it was just
I kind of said to them, you know, there's the little businesses that have supported us from the
day we started
and I'd rather get, I'd rather get people to go into there to buy our product to
spend the money with them!
And they just couldn't get it.
They couldn't understand it at all. Then they rang back
maybe two or three times that same week to see if I'd changed my mind yet.
In the end they went with Bradwell's Ice Cream and the last time I went in
Broadwell's ice cream was being discounted below the supermarket's own ice cream
which is, you know, it would have been a disaster tif they had have done that to ours
because its kind of, you now, you're basically saying that the supermarket's ice cream
is worth more and better than such an established company! So, I say
we were never going to do it anyway.
I mean, I quite fancy trying to get the milk into one of the supermarkets,
but I don't think for a second
they'll do it because if you were to say to shoppers
would you like milk that has come from a cow the same morning,
you know, why would they buy anything else on their shelves?
It's just almost too good an offer really!
It'd be a bit of fun really. There's
like, butchers shops and bakeries and then there's a little
Urban Deli that we will be going to this morning
that sells our milk, but I mean its
just really important for us to be able to get the message across to
people that
we're literally delivering milk to those little shops the morning its been milked
from our cows!
And its just, you know,
a product as fresh as that is only available from the little independents
so, I mean, its a good reason for people to go in and use it
and supermarkets know rightly
that milk, people need to buy milk often, so they use milk as a loss leader to get
people into their store often
so it is great for us to be able to get people to use the little independents
as often as they can
We sell Moss Valley sausages and bacon, thats based and all done in Sheffield,
in our shop on the farm, so what I do is, when I am delivering
milk to the likes of PJ Taste, or Urban Deli,
Steve'll drop the sausages off there while he does his delivery for
me and I deliver the milk and take the sausages back, so we try and
overlap as much as we possibly can. I mean its just
there is so much kind of great stuff out there that you can, we do the same
with the brownies
they drop, they deliver brownies to Tamper Coffee and they deliver ones
for our shop there and I pick our Brownies up there, it just
kind of saves a lot of miles for everybody.
I just thought that there is so much great food produced in Sheffield
you know, you've got pork, beef, ale, honey
dairy products, cakes, you name it
there's loads of stuff going on but they are all kind of really small, and we thought
it would work much more effectively if
we all kind of club together to just be able to kind of like raise the
profile
of food produced in Sheffield, so last year's food festival
we had a showcase of eight
food producers from Sheffield just to be able to say
all of this food is produced in Sheffield and it its all available to buy
but, I mean importantly, its all available to buy from independents.
So loads of little independents in Sheffield have
all this food in, so then we got all the Sheffield food flags for
people to have and they can fly it outside of their premises to try and raise the
profile so if people want to know where they can buy Sheffield food
they can kind of look out for the flags and that.
What is the importance of independents in terms of community and the local economy?
Well, I mean, for me,
sort of taking it from what we do at the farm,
people can come up to farm, they can see me, they can see my mum and my dad,
if they spend £1.60 on an ice cream cone,
they can see that goes to preserving the countryside,
keeping the dry stone walls up, if we need,
some advertising, we'll get
Coates Signs in Hillsborough to make us a sign, so that money gets spent in Hillsborough,
we get our sugar from Hutchkins in Sheffield,
so we buy some sugar and spend that £1.60 on Sheffield sugar,
its just even down to the labels, everything, all of the money
that comes into our
independent business gets plowed into other businesses
I mean, its like the people that we've seen today as we've been to deliver the milk,
you know, they are all independent businesses, they've all got families, they know my name,
you go into supermarket - you're never going to meet Mr Sainsbury's,
You'll never, ever get to see the people
kinda behind it and its just, I kind of think you miss that, you know, you're
just spending your money with a global thing rather than
kind of, you know, seeing the guy that is running it.