Transcript
WILL DOBSON:
I'm Will Dobson, and I run the Meon Spirit Company, which trades as Hill Farm Juice. We make a premium range of apple juices on the farm. And I'm the owner and sole director of the company. This has its advantages, in that it's a committee of one, which makes decision-making very fast. The limitation of that is, I don't have anybody day to day that I can bounce ideas off, which is a huge disadvantage.
In addition, I'm also the managing director of Hill Farm Orchards, which is the growing side of the business. There are limitations, in that I'm spreading myself relatively thinly across quite a few enterprises. But it allows the businesses to react to their environment very quickly.
One area that I know I need to look at within the business is looking at having a more diverse team to be able to spread the load across. So, from a sustainability point of view, actually the business is at risk just purely from what happens if I disappear. One of the things that is the director's duties to look at is to make sure that there is sustainability within its leadership team, so that the business will continue to survive in any event.
One of the nice innovations that we have is, with the growing side, we're able to experiment with different varieties. This season, we have produced, in very limited numbers, a variety called Tickled Pink. It's a red-fleshed apple, which is quite unusual, in that the juice that it produces is red as well and holds its colour.
When I took over Hill Farm Juice, all of the clear juices were bottled into green bottles with gold caps, and the cloudy juices were in clear bottles with silver caps. Very shortly after I took over the business, to be quite honest, I got a bit bored in the middle of a boxing run, looked at the green bottles going through, and just – mind started wondering.
So I put a couple of clear bottles through the line. And what came out looked like a bottle of white wine. And it just – it looked far better than as a green bottle.
It showed off the product. You could see the colour. The whole thing just looked fresher. From a production point of view, that actually gives another challenge, in that our filtration for clear juices had to be so much better, because in a clear bottle we couldn't hide anything.
For us, sustainability is as much down to environmental credentials as to making sure that we're not spending too much on our distribution – actually making the product in such a way that it's economic to send to the end user. To produce, that we are not overutilising resources by being in glass bottles rather than plastic. Glass is recyclable, the world over. Plastic does have environmental concerns. Yes, it's lighter to transport, but it's also very easy to throw away. And, from a sustainability point of view, it's something that's quite important to us.
I'm a sailor at heart. And I do travel, and you do see plastic all over the place. And I think glass is the way forwards.
One of our biggest constraints, at the moment, is route to market, is distribution. We have a product that the margins are relatively low, transport is increasingly expensive, and probably our biggest challenge to expansion, and certainly including the sustainability side of things, is, how do distribute while maintaining sensible margins?