Ice cream maker Callestick Farm celebrated its 30th anniversary by having one of its most successful years – with increased turnover and exports and a licensing deal with Reggae Reggae Sauce inventor Levi Roots.
The Cornish firm saw turnover jump 24.8% and secured a major £500,000 five-year contract to export to China.
It also agreed a collaboration with Mr Roots, the celebrity culinary entrepreneur famous for landing investment on TV’s Dragon’s Den. The new range of spicy Caribbean-inspired products will be on supermarket shelves in early 2020.
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Truro-based Callestick Farm also launched a new ice-cream in partnership with St Piran pro-cycling team and won a raft of awards, including the prestigious product accolades in the Great Taste, Great British Food, Chef’s Choice and Taste of the West awards.
It was also named Family Business of the Year in the Western Morning News Business Awards.
“We’re delighted with our year-end results and are looking forward to another 12 months of sustained expansion,” said sales director David Jeffs, who joined the company board as its first non-family member in 2018.
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“2019 proved a landmark year for us in many ways and there are more very exciting developments in the pipeline.
“The quality of our dairy and non-dairy ice-cream is of course key to everything we do. That’s why all the awards we’ve been winning is so important and why we are committed to creating new lines and new great tastes - alongside our existing favourites of course.”
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Angela and Sebastian Parker started making ice-cream on their farm in 1989 as a way of counteracting the negative commercial effects brought about by the introduction of milk quotas.
Until then, Sebastian’s parents Simon and Judith Parker had been rearing animals and growing cereals on the land they first bought in 1953.
Milk quotas meant a 10% drop in the family income, so Sebastian and his wife Angela came up with the idea of making ice-cream.
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The business has grown with the farm now 10 times its original size, and its herd of 345 cows helping to produce at least 700,000 litres of ice cream each year.
Meanwhile, Jamaican-born Mr Roots – real name Keith Valentine Alexander David Bright Graham – has increased his brand presence with a variety of products including a collaboration with Plymouth’s Burts Snacks to produce Levi Roots Crisps.
Mr Roots, who has released an album called Red Hot but is now working on something ice cold \at Callestick Farm, is no stranger to the South West. In addition to his collaborations with Callestick Farm and Burts Snacks he also mentored young business brains at Plymouth College.