The answer was Wildfarmed, co-founded with Edd Lees and George Lamb, which, since 2018 has grown into a network of 150 mainly British farms. Collectively, their wheat produces the Wildfarmed flours now found in restaurants and on UK supermarket shelves. Wildfarmed also makes breads and supplies oats and barley; the latter to breweries including Jubel.
For farmers, switching to regenerative methods is risky. Conventional farming uses various chemical treatments to, says Andy, “control nature”. The regenerative approach, which aims to radically improve soil health, minimises the use of such treatments (Wildfarmed bans pesticides on its crops, for example). Instead it requires farms to work in “collaboration with nature”, with minimal ploughing, and fertilising land by intermingling crops, plants and grazing animals, which can be a challenge for newcomers.
Wildfarmed eases that transition by offering expert guidance and guaranteed prices to its farmers. As a phrase or concept, ‘regenerative farming’ is criticised for lacking clear definition and rules. But Wildfarmed farms are required to adhere to key methods and standards, subject to third-party auditing. Wildfarmed also works with scientific partners to verifiably measure the positive impact of regenerative practices, in terms of biodiversity, water quality and carbon emissions. To an extent, Wildfarmed’s flours, creating using blends of wheats, stand or fall on flavour.
“There is a correlation between how you grow, taste and quality,” says Andy, who now farms in southern England. But he feels Wildfarmed must actively explain its approach to the buying public: “If you’re saying to them, ‘pay a bit more for this flour’, they quite reasonably say, ‘why?’.” Such transparency is essential to generate buy-in and inspire other businesses to back sustainable farming. “We’ve got a small amount of ecological road left,” warns Andy. “We need Wildfarmed-type businesses for cabbages, carrots – everything.”
Setting pulses racing: Hodmedod’s, East Anglia
“Pulses have really had a moment”, says Hodmedod’s co-founder, Nick Saltmarsh. Foodies have rediscovered beans, lentils and peas as a delicious essential in many vibrant global cuisines – and as sustainability superheroes.
Hodmedod’s has played a distinctive role in that glow-up. By working with British farmers to realise pioneering harvests of lentils, and creating a retail range that runs from canned UK fava beans to smoked paprika yellow peas, its promotion of UK-grown pulses has, since 2012, encouraged foodies to reevaluate how pulses are grown and their potential.
The Hodmedod’s journey started during research into an ideal UK diet, in which its co-founders discovered that fava beans, grown here in significant volumes for centuries, are exported or sold as animal feed, but not eaten domestically. That seemed bizarre. Fava beans taste fantastic (they are prized in Egyptian cuisine), and, like all pulses, this low-intensity, plant-friendly crop ‘fixes’ nitrogen in farm soils, acting as a natural fertiliser.
Hodmedod’s saw great potential in turning shoppers onto fava and other British-grown pulses such as carlin peas (Hodmedod’s answer to the chickpea), and would create a nutritious, sustainable new food source almost out of nowhere. “There’s need for change across the system. We want to demonstrate where things can be done differently and better,” says Nick.
Exemplifying that, Hodmedod’s work closely with over 30 UK farms, not because it opposes imports (in fact, Hodmedod’s sells organic French borlotti), but because it values the provenance insight such proximity enables. Insight that is impossible in a remote system of globally traded foods. “If you know who’s grown your food and how, that incentivises production done the right way,” says Nick.
Thirteen years in, Hodmedod’s supplies a range of co-branded products to Holland & Barrett nationally, handles over 1,000 tonnes of pulses annually, and has expanded its portfolio of traceable, sustainable foods to include items as diverse as seaweed and edible grains, such as pearled spelt. With around 700,000 tonnes of pulses grown annually in the UK, Hodmedod’s impact is small. But, “in a symbolically significant way”, says Nick. It has proven that, “there are opportunities to change farming, our diets and get more diversity into both.”
Next level carb fest: Northern Pasta Co., Kendal
“The challenge is people don’t even look at the pasta aisle. You just reach out and chuck your pasta in,” explains Imogen Royall, co- founder of Northern Pasta Co. This young company is determined to make pasta as planet-friendly as possible, and make your choice of pasta “an intentional purchase”.
For Imogen and her husband Matt Kenyon, who is a former builder, their zeal for sustainability goes back to growing up in Cumbria, “surrounded by beautiful nature,” says Imogen. “You want to look after that”. But it wasn’t until Imogen, then working in an artisan bakery, began to take an interest in ancient grains, that their outlook began to coalesce into a business. Imogen was finding ancient wheats, such as spelt, easier to digest, and was also fascinated by how such hardier wheat varieties can thrive in regenerative UK farming systems. They wondered, could ancient grains be used to make pasta?
During the pandemic, Imogen and Matt would go on a deep dive of YouTube pasta tutorials and Reddit threads as they experimented with spelt flour pastas at home. There is some history of spelt pasta-making in Italy, mainly in Tuscany and Umbria, but the couple largely refined their process by, “trial, error and lots of pasta tasting”. “We wanted to create pasta without compromise. It had to be delicious. It had to behave like pasta,” says Imogen. Eventually, they settled on a recipe based on regeneratively grown white spelt flour, with some additional organic wheat semolina. The pasta is then bronze die extruded and slow dried at low temperatures for flavour.
The result is a range of pastas that, like the best high-end versions, achieve a creamy texture and retain al-dente bite, hold their shape well and are tasty enough that you could eat them simply dressed with good oil, pepper and parmesan (the spelt adds a nice earthy, nutty edge). Despite only making its debut on Kendal Farmers’ Market in June 2022, Northern Pasta Co is now a team of six fulfilling orders for Ocado and Booths, among others.
Their production facility is solar-powered and pasta is packaged in paper. Every decision is taken with sustainability and quality in mind: “We’re trying to show you can have everything – look after our environments, pay farmers fairly, zero plastic packaging and delicious pasta.” Anything less would be “underestimating our consumers”, she says. “They want better. Our growth is reflective of that.”
