Our History
If we'd known then what we know now...
In 1960 the farm here had 40 acres and 30 cows. For the next 20 years we grew, as families and as a farm; land was cleared, buildings renovated, space made, plans hatched...
And in 1984 we had our first go at making ice cream.
It wasn't a success.
The big old machine we used made an awful racket and took ages to clean. The idea seemed too expensive; we gave up and moved on.
We only had another crack at it three years later because we'd been selling plenty of whipping cream, for which we'd bought a small pasteuriser. (And once you've got pasteurised milk and cream, you're only one small machine away from turning it into ice cream.)
Three important things then happened, a bridge between then and now. A man called John James was invited down from Hereford to share his ice-cream expertise and to enthuse us all. He succeeded on both counts, and left us with a machine which – this time – we could actually use. By August bank holiday a whole summer's worth of experimenting and help from visitors, had resulted in a range of 20 flavours. We held a Tasting Day to whittle the 20 down to a favourite few, but all the flavours proved too popular and resisted whittling; the range remained at 20.
And so we started selling tubs and cones from the farm; we'd begun.
In subsequent years we grew. We sold from a parlour Archies Loft in Coverack, from a stall in Truro's Lemon Street market and from a café in Falmouth. Then outlets all over Cornwall were selling the ice cream; things went so well we kept having to find new space and reorganise.
A Reverse Osmosis machine might sound like something Dr Who uses to destroy alien life-forms, but we bought one in 2004. Why? Because – simply put – it takes some of the water out of the skimmed milk making sure we get the maximum amount of our goodness into our yoghurt ices and ice creams. (We also put in a heat recovery system to make sure the heat generated as a result of production processes such as ice cream making, could be captured and reused ... )
Since then we haven't stopped. In 2004 we won Best Food Producer in Radio 4's Food and Farming Awards, continued to expand and, most recently, successfully launched the very well-received new organic range which, like all our ice cream, you'll now find easier and easier to enjoy wherever you are in the country...
