Doves Farm

Today we visited Doves Farm---a farm, mill, bakery, and labeler. Founded in 1978, it began selling flour and digestive biscuits and today sells everything from gluten free flour to baking soda and it is always in the process of product development. Michael Marriage gave us a tour and presentation on the company through which I learned some very interesting facts.

Did you know that:

Less than 5% of food products continue to be produced for more than 25 years? Our attention span is short. Consumers like to see new products. For Doves Farm this translates into looking towards selling ancient wheat varieties such as einkorn where as for other companies this means the development of 3-D Doritos.

Iceland is a net exporter of bananas. Some of the products that Doves Farm produces are made with bananas. The closest source would be Iceland, Michael predicted, but it doesn’t have a big enough supply. He buys fair trade bananas and will continue to do so until shipping them becomes too costly.

30% of the cost of a loaf of bread is in its distribution. Doves Farm contracts out the baking and distribution of the bread that bears their company name for just this reason. Their bakery is also not set up for bread baking.

For a product to be considered fair trade, a fair trade ingredient must comprise at least 20% of the product. In their snack bars, sugar is this ingredient, thus they ended up a tad unnecessarily sweet because of Doves Farm’s desire to have the product be fair trade certified.

The company is involved in the Real Bread Campaign. Real Bread is bread with no artificial additives, which are common in many massed produced loaves. It concerns me that we are feeling the need to let consumers know when products or ingredients are real—shouldn’t they be able to judge that on their own? It is hard for them to do so in many cases because of the lenient labeling laws. Ideally everything would be real. I’m real. This blog is tending towards un-real.

It costs Michael more to shear his sheep than he can get from selling the wool. Much of the wool produced in the United Kingdom is used in rugs and wool insulation.

The toes of pointe shoes in ballet are made with rye flour. Who knew?! Not I. Said the fly. Someone proposed that people use of it once the shoes wear out. A tiny pancake, perhaps?

On that note—I must bid you adieu, so as I can rest my head and finish my book.

Good night!