Farmers Weekly awards winner gains new business

The 2013 Farmers Weekly Farmer of the Year , Lord Newborough (pictured right), has added another A-list chef to the portfolio of top restaurants and chefs around the world the farm supplies meat to.

Rhug Estate now supplies Oliver Lange (pictured left) who manages the prestigious Magazine Restaurant in the Serpentine Gallery in Kensington Gardens, London with organic meat produced on its 1,400ha Welsh fields near Corwen.

This includes organic lamb, beef, bison, salt marsh lamb, chicken, pork and turkey.

The Rhug Estate approach to chefs was slightly unorthodox, said Lord Newborough, since he and his colleague Joan Redmond were not trained sales people.

It started with a conversation on the phone, a meeting and then a visual presentation to tell the story of Rhug. “This is the key since, the story covers the organic credentials of the farm, the high standards of animal welfare adopted and the fact that everything is free range and managed in the most natural way embracing and working with the environment to mutual advantage,” he said.

“We like to sell the stress-free aspects as we believe that this is crucial to producing the very best meat. Rhug is quite unique in as much it is a true field to plate operation and chefs like the fact that we are in control of every aspect of the production cycle.”

Chef Oliver Lange said he believed that, “What you buy is what you get”, and that the Rhug organic meat was of consistently high quality with minimal shrinkage and less weight. However, Lord Newborough said the biggest factor behind Rhug’s success in getting organic meat into the Magazine restaurant and indeed the growing number of top restaurants around the world from Abu Dhabi to Dubai and the Oman lay in their “personal caring approach”, alongside provenance, consistency and reliability of quality.

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