Recently James Martin’s Saturday Kitchen featured an entrepreneur from Herefordshire, who had made his own vodka from potatoes and had just won the award of best vodka in the world.
Intrigued and wanting to know more I emailed a request for an interview. I received a positive reply and we set up the interview below.
I wanted to understand why a potato farmer risks starting a new business in the drinks industry, competing with some of the biggest businesses on the planet.
H&CNews: How did you get into farming and what after 20 years of farming made you look at developing into this new business area..?
WC: “Coming from a farming family I wanted to be a farmer and bought my parents farm from them. With the benefit of hindsight I borrowed too much, was under capitalised and eventually went bust.”
H&CNews: It was interesting at this point how unashamed this statement felt to my ear, more of this later.
In 1992 Will started again and rather than ‘grow and sell potatoes’ he ‘bought and sold’ potatoes. Buying from other farmers in the region and selling to supermarkets. It was a simple business model where healthy margins coupled with early positive cash flow enabled a small business to establish.
Then supermarkets started to deal more and more directly with farmers in an effort to reduce their own costs, squeezing the likes of Will’s new business.
WC: “With the continual price pressure from the supermarkets, I realised I had to change direction. I wanted to remain in farming and produce a great tasting product we could make from potatoes.
I was hit one day with the Eureka moment to turn my potatoes into chips.
I then spent 2002 travelling the world to source the equipment and recipe to make potato chips. By the summer, Tyrrells was born.
My Tyrrells homemade chips sold really well and were a big success as customers bought into the ‘pedigree’ of the product, we were actually growing the potatoes and making a genuine product on our farm.
As Tyrrells grew I was searching for the next step. In 2004 whilst travelling in the USA, looking for packaging equipment for the chips, I stumbled on a small distillery making potato vodka and thought this would be a great new chapter to life. So I returned home, thought about it and decided it would definitely be more fun making vodka. I researched the market and found it to be full of a lot of ‘twee’ marketing stories or large corporate companies. So I thought there would be a market if we could make a quality product and sell it with provenance and pedigree.”
H&CNews: To what degree did having the entrepreneurial experience gained in creating Tyrrells help with setting out to create the distillery..?
WC: “My key challenge was how to establish a new vodka brand and my experience at Tyrrells helped. If someone wants to set up a new food & drinks business, competing with the big boys is nearly impossible.
Our Herefordshire roots helped us to differentiate our new brand offering and were in keeping with the acceptance of the wider British brand that was gaining vogue at the time. We were ‘made in Herefordshire’ and that complimented ‘made in Britain’.
We try things, new things, inventive things and we are not afraid to fail. You can learn a lot from mistakes, especially if you learn how not to repeat them.
We also knew that little businesses can’t be big businesses so purposefully kept the operation small. We needed the dynamic culture of a small business that most big businesses somehow manage to suffocate.
Today we have a team of ten, all team members are multi taskers and all know how to apply hands to decks.
From the idea in 2004, it took us until April fool’s day 2008 to make the first batch of vodka in June 2008.
Today we also make Gin, a small range of liqueurs and some specials such as marmalade vodka.
We are deeply passionate about what we do and that is one of the key lessons I have learned that helps small businesses be successful.
We are also inventive and not me too, we apply care and attention to what we do, we want to be involved with our distributors and we want our distributors to be involved with us.
Our focus is on our continuing need to communicate more with people so they understand our brand.”
I requested the interview as I wanted to try and understand what had led a potato farmer from Herefordshire to developing a distillery business judged currently to be the best in the world at what it does. The simple answer resonating throughout our conversation was Entrepreneurial Spirit.
Denis Sheehan
Publisher, Hospitality and Catering News
If you would like to put forward an Entrepreneurial Spirit story to Hospitality and Catering News…I would be delighted to hear from you.