William Kendall leads a double life as supermarket supplier and passionate local farmer, says Claire Hu
Jostling in a pigpen with two feisty specimens called Kylie and Britney is the last place most people would expect to find William Kendall, a business and brands guru renowned for turning around New Covent Garden Food Co and now at the helm of Green & Black’s. Yet it’s the rough and tumble, and the experimental nature of his latest venture - a tiny organic farm near Saxmundham in Suffolk - that attracted him.
As chief executive of the £36m-turnover Green & Black’s, Kendall heads a company that has just been bought by Cadbury Schweppes and is poised to go global.
But now he is determined to turn Maple Farm, an organic vegetable, fruit and egg smallholding that his wife inherited from an uncle, into a profitable enterprise. It’s much more than a hobby to Kendall, who comes from a farming family and whose cousin Peter Kendall is NFU deputy president. He believes strongly that the future for British farmers lies in directly supplying consumers.
“My job in London is to fix businesses,” he says. “My mission here is to create a small farm that’s viable because it sells directly to the public. The only way for British farming to survive is to find a direct route. People are dying to buy local food with a story but don’t know where to get it.”
A year ago, Kendall began farming with farm manager Tim Lewis and another full-time employee. He supplies local farm shops and markets, and although the farm is not in profit, Kendall says the plan is to prove the commercial viability of small-scale production as well as provide jobs for locals. The main challenge is to find a route to market for the organic vegetables and fruit he produces, including sweetcorn, cherry tomatoes, strawberries, as well as organic eggs from his flock of 100 hens and organic flour milled on the site.
The closure of a greengrocer in the nearby town of Alborough provided an opportunity to set up a stall that has grown from a weekly to a daily event and he now gets invitations to attend farmers’ markets all over Suffolk. He has started supplying local people with boxes of organic fruit and veg for £12 each a week. There are already 30 customers, and the goal is to hit 100.
Farm shops may take a 25% cut from
Kendall, but he says this is vastly preferential to selling through supermarkets, which he says have left many British farmers barely scratching a living.
He believes farmers are well positioned to take advantage of increasing interest in food provenance and local sourcing.
“The solution isn’t to get an extra penny or two for a lettuce in supermarkets, it’s about how we sell more for 99p each and we are never going to do that in supermarkets,” he says.
“Supermarkets are quietly killing each other and I think they have had their heyday. How long can you carry on making such profits if a large part of your public don’t like you and instead sort of suffer you? It’s the same analogy as McDonald’s - suddenly they stopped growing and are now trying to persuade people back to them.”
While Kendall is sensitive to suggestions that it’s easy for such a high earner to run an organic farm as a hobby, he stresses that he won’t be “pig-headed” about continuing if Maple Farm does not earn its keep.
And his manager Tim Lewis, a local, denies that increasing interest in food provenance is limited to the middle-class ‘Wandsworth housewife’ that Kendall uses as target consumer in the day job to devise new marketing ploys for Green & Black’s.
“It’s not just the rich who care about where their food comes from, and all the stuff on TV about how chickens are treated will help places such as us,” says Lewis. “Farmers have to be more independent. We are moving into a new subsidy regime where there is no incentive to produce unless it makes money.”
Jostling in a pigpen with two feisty specimens called Kylie and Britney is the last place most people would expect to find William Kendall, a business and brands guru renowned for turning around New Covent Garden Food Co and now at the helm of Green & Black’s. Yet it’s the rough and tumble, and the experimental nature of his latest venture - a tiny organic farm near Saxmundham in Suffolk - that attracted him.
As chief executive of the £36m-turnover Green & Black’s, Kendall heads a company that has just been bought by Cadbury Schweppes and is poised to go global.
But now he is determined to turn Maple Farm, an organic vegetable, fruit and egg smallholding that his wife inherited from an uncle, into a profitable enterprise. It’s much more than a hobby to Kendall, who comes from a farming family and whose cousin Peter Kendall is NFU deputy president. He believes strongly that the future for British farmers lies in directly supplying consumers.
“My job in London is to fix businesses,” he says. “My mission here is to create a small farm that’s viable because it sells directly to the public. The only way for British farming to survive is to find a direct route. People are dying to buy local food with a story but don’t know where to get it.”
A year ago, Kendall began farming with farm manager Tim Lewis and another full-time employee. He supplies local farm shops and markets, and although the farm is not in profit, Kendall says the plan is to prove the commercial viability of small-scale production as well as provide jobs for locals. The main challenge is to find a route to market for the organic vegetables and fruit he produces, including sweetcorn, cherry tomatoes, strawberries, as well as organic eggs from his flock of 100 hens and organic flour milled on the site.
The closure of a greengrocer in the nearby town of Alborough provided an opportunity to set up a stall that has grown from a weekly to a daily event and he now gets invitations to attend farmers’ markets all over Suffolk. He has started supplying local people with boxes of organic fruit and veg for £12 each a week. There are already 30 customers, and the goal is to hit 100.
Farm shops may take a 25% cut from
Kendall, but he says this is vastly preferential to selling through supermarkets, which he says have left many British farmers barely scratching a living.
He believes farmers are well positioned to take advantage of increasing interest in food provenance and local sourcing.
“The solution isn’t to get an extra penny or two for a lettuce in supermarkets, it’s about how we sell more for 99p each and we are never going to do that in supermarkets,” he says.
“Supermarkets are quietly killing each other and I think they have had their heyday. How long can you carry on making such profits if a large part of your public don’t like you and instead sort of suffer you? It’s the same analogy as McDonald’s - suddenly they stopped growing and are now trying to persuade people back to them.”
While Kendall is sensitive to suggestions that it’s easy for such a high earner to run an organic farm as a hobby, he stresses that he won’t be “pig-headed” about continuing if Maple Farm does not earn its keep.
And his manager Tim Lewis, a local, denies that increasing interest in food provenance is limited to the middle-class ‘Wandsworth housewife’ that Kendall uses as target consumer in the day job to devise new marketing ploys for Green & Black’s.
“It’s not just the rich who care about where their food comes from, and all the stuff on TV about how chickens are treated will help places such as us,” says Lewis. “Farmers have to be more independent. We are moving into a new subsidy regime where there is no incentive to produce unless it makes money.”
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