A few words from Tom - April 2023
Dear Gin Fans,
I can’t believe it’s the start of April, spring has sprung, swallows have just landed back at the farm and SUMMER IS COMING!! What a roller coaster of a year so far!!
Firstly, I would like to thank you for opening the email and reading the first sentence. It’s currently a very noisy world and a very hard trading environment for small independent business, so we appreciate you devoting some time to read our update, which will hopefully spread a little joy as we tell you of our tales to ensure you have THE best drinks in the world at your disposal.
We kicked off the year with dry January, which turned out to be our biggest yet. As a small producer our budgets are limited but we got a huge amount of love organically, we got some amazing coverage simply due to the quality of our liquids. Some of the UKs best know drinks aficionados decided to give us a shout out, Helen McGinn from Saturday Kitchen was on Instagram and Victoria Moore featured us in the Saturday Telegraph, and both were saying our Juniper Double Dry is the best 0% Spirit on market, obviously they are 100% right. Also unexpectedly, and for the same reason the Thinking Drinkers had us on This Morning with Holly and Phil, where everyone LOVED the Juniper Double Dry, they all know what they are talking about it’s a fab liquid that really delivers a 0% G&T! We also got the first 0% listing in Luton Airport for our 0% which was a very exciting indeed and we have just found out we are the fastest growing 0% on Amazon!!
During January, Martyn battled the wind and the rain in the botanical gardens to bring in the first harvest of the year, Angelica Root! This is part of the “Holy Ginity” for our gins, Juniper, Coriander and Angelica, crush these in a pestle and mortar and you have the aroma of gin. It’s a native crop whose production moved abroad over the years as it’s not as easy to farm or as other commercially viable root veg or traditional crops. It’s a bloody fantastic ingredient, very important in gin and what we grow on the farm is way better than anything we can buy. So, in our mission to make the best drinks for you to enjoy we grow a lot of it at the farm so that we are self-sufficient. It’s also a fabulous crop for nature as it creates great habitat.
Not as sexy but of utmost importance, in January we gained a grade A in our BRC audit, this is an annual event which is the British Retail Consortium's official assessment of a food manufacturer's adherence to its Global Standard for Food Safety. It means not only do our drinks taste good they are safe, complaint and can be sold anywhere around the world. It is a huge piece of work for the business and I would like to thank the technical team for guiding us all through the assessment.
The next big news was that we came 28th Nationally in the best companies to work for which is a fabulous achievement and I think is why our drinks taste so good, all those positive vibes flowing through the business. You can check out our scores here, it’s a real boost for all of us, a small team fighting through the current cost of living crisis and staying positive.
February saw the return of tours to the farm, and they have been ROCKING!!! If you have not been yet you need to get booked in, Saturdays are nearly fully booked for the rest of the year, but we will be opening up Thursdays and Fridays soon.
It was International Women's Day on the 8th of March, which is always a busy time for us as a business that has a fantastic female co-founder and leader, 63% of our team are female including the fabulous Tina Warner-Keogh. Tina started the Warner’s Wolfpack to support and promote the entire business but with a specific aim of empowering women. As a result of being so awesome, Tina was in high demand to deliver inspirational talks across the country for some big business including Metro Bank and Metropolitan Pub Co.
March was BCorp month, with a theme of #wegobeyond, raising awareness about what BCorp accreditation is and means. We received our accreditation in August 2022 and couldn’t be prouder to be recognised as a business that is held to the highest standards of corporate, social and environmental responsibility – in short we use business as a force for good. There are only 5,000 BCorp businesses in the world, 1,000 in the UK and we are one of them. BCorp selected us, one of ten businesses that took delivery of the BIG B that travelled around the country during March. This gave us the opportunity to invite the other 9 BCorp businesses from around the county to come to the farm.
Huge news to finish on, and we have saved the best until last, so well done if you have gotten this far! We have just signed three distribution agreements for Ireland, Australia and the United States of America, which have been under negotiation for the last 18 months! This is huge news for us as a business and will really help us on our mission to save the world from mediocre drinks.
So its been a bloody busy start to the year and we can’t thank you enough for the support you give an independent family owned business navigating all the headwinds there are at the moment. Remember you all vote with what you purchase, so drink less and drink better!
