Business is booming for an award-winning family ice cream company thanks to a partnership with a growing UK food wholesaler.
Cheshire Farm Ice Cream signed a distribution deal with Harlech Foodservice 12 months ago and as they go into a second year, sales are forecast to rise to over 65,000 litres.
In the first 10 months of the partnership, the farm has gained 153 new stockists of its 50-plus flavours of real dairy ice cream, sorbets and plant-based ice-cream.
That’s an impressive performance for a venture that started out in 1986 when dairy farmers Tom and Margaret Fell looked to diversify into ice cream after cuts to their milk quota.
They set up an ice-cream shop on their tenant farm on the Bolesworth Estate, near Chester, and the business went from strength to strength and soon started supplying local hotels, shops, restaurants and pubs and they now have nine vans that deliver to those customers.
Nearly 40 years on sons Graeme and Jonathan are in charge of the operation with Graeme in charge of the ice-cream manufacture and wholesale business and Jonathan The Ice Cream Farm visitor attraction which brings in three-quarters of a million visitors a year.
Their success encouraged them to move out of farming but the milk to produce up to 10,000 litres of ice cream a day still comes from 500 plus Friesian cows grazing in the surrounding fields.
Ed Warrington, wholesale manager for the ice-cream manufacturing business, said: “It takes us 24 hours to pick up the milk from the local milking parlour, pasteurise it and turn it into ice cream.
“We have been supplying ice cream parlours, pubs, restaurants and hotels for over 30 years via our own fleet of temperature-controlled vehicles.
“Then Harlech called us to talk about a partnership and it made perfect sense – both of our brands have good recognition locally and we share the same values as we are both family businesses.
“Getting our products onto Harlech’s wheels has opened up much bigger markets as they supply to a much wider area taking in all of Wales, the North West and the West Midlands.”
Chris Gregson, Harlech’s head of sales, said: “Our sales in the first year have been amazing and it has opened up new markets in areas which they weren’t previously reaching.
“Cheshire Farm Ice Cream has nine vans but with us, it now has another 65 vehicles delivering their products six days a week and they now the potential for hundreds of new customers across the whole of Wales.
“This year we are expecting an increase in sales of over 300 per cent and we are training our 30 strong sales team in selling over 20 varieties of Cheshire Farm Ice Cream which we see as a top quality product with a wide appeal.”
Cheshire Farm managing director Graeme Fell added: “I’m very much looking forward to 2025. We have a symbiotic relationship with Harlech and work together to our mutual benefit.”
Harlech’s expansion over the past three years has seen their sales increase from £32 million to a record turnover of around £50 million with profit at an all-time high of more than £2 million.
Harlech managing director David Cattrall said: “We’re having a record year for sales and a record year for profit even though we are reinvesting heavily in making the business fit for the future and making sure our prices are aggressively competitive.”
Its current £6 million expansion plan, announced last year, has enabled the company to create 75 jobs with that number expected to double this year while it has added depots in Telford, Merthyr Tydfil and Carmarthen in South and West Wales.
Image: (From left) Graeme Fell, Joe Capper-Moore and Julie Harris, of Cheshire Farm Ice-Cream, with Chris Gregson of Harlech Foodservice. (Credit: Mandy Jones Photography)
