New golden oil is testing farmers’ marketing skills

It’s tempting – but maybe a bit premature – to say that the reign of olive oil as the king of culinary oils is drawing to a close.

We Britons buy £104m-worth of it every year, according to market research company Mintel, and sales are still climbing. In fact the value of olive oil sales now outpaces that of any other cooking oil.

And there’s no denying that olive oil is a marketing man’s dream recipe. Take a few sun-drenched images of gorgeous Tuscan countryside, stir in some mouth-watering health benefits, add palate-tickling taste and you have a dish the British middle classes can’t resist.

But an as-yet tiny contender has come from nowhere to challenge the dominance of olive oil. It’s cold-pressed rapeseed oil, made from home-grown oilseed rape, and it’s quietly appearing on the shelves of farm shops, delicatessens and supermarkets around the country.

It may be a featherweight in terms of market share but it packs a big punch in several key areas.

Take health. Cold-pressed rapeseed oil has less than half the saturated fat of olive oil (6% compared to 14%) and 10 times the levels of Omega 3. Not only that, but the Omega 3 is in the ideal 1:2 balance with Omega 6 for protecting the heart and lowering cholesterol levels.

Take taste and cooking qualities, too. Rapeseed oil has a higher smoke point than its Mediterranean rival, so you can get the oil hotter before it starts to smoke. It has a nice-but-subtle flavour too, which is good news for people who find olive oil a bit strong-tasting in dressings.

And of course its food mile count is much lower. Which might not have mattered three or four years ago, but is now an important factor for the typically well-off, environmentally-savvy, premium oil buyer.

And it’s important to distinguish between cold-pressed rapeseed oil and the cheaper hot-blended version you’ll find down at the bottom of the cooking oil display in most supermarkets (though that comes from British farms and scores well on food miles too).

Cold-pressed means the rape is simply mechanically squeezed to get the oil out of the seeds, whereas hot pressing involves heating it up, adding a solvent to boost the extraction rate and then refining and deodorising it.

The first person to market cold-pressed rapeseed oil in Britain was Suffolk farmer Sam Fairs with his Hill Farm Oils brand. He had read about the terrific qualities of the oil but couldn’t understand why no one in the UK was producing it. After a lot of effort he managed to get a press and start producing it from his own oilseed rape in 2004.

Next into the market was Northamptonshire farmer Duncan Farrrington, who started selling his Mellow Yellow oil some four months later, though he had been working on it for a while. In fact, he had seen farmers pressing their own rapeseed oil in Germany back in 1992 but didn’t feel the market was ready for it.

A surge in activity in 2006 saw another four farmers start selling the oil, with a seventh, the Little Yorkshire Farming Company, joining the select group shortly.

For all of them, making the shift from being mainly commodity crop producers to operating in a fast-moving, consumer-facing niche has been something of a shock. And while articles in newspapers and foodie magazines have helped spread the word about the oil, marketing it has involved a lot of hard work.

“I thought that because it was healthier than olive oil it would sell itself,” says Mr Fairs. But being the first one into the market meant he had to persuade farm shops and delis to take the oil. “Marketing cost a fortune,” he says.

That’s a sentiment echoed by many of the other producers. Stow-on-the-Wold farmer and contractor Hamish Campbell took time off from running his 800ha (2000-acre) arable farm to cold-call more than 500 hotels and restaurants to promote his R-Oil brand’s benefits. He even got celebrity chefs like Heston Blumenthal and Raymond Blanc to try it.

“It is tough to sell a new product like this,” he says. “We’ve put so much work into it, but it’s amazing what you’ll do when you’re selling your own product.”

He reckons 50% of his time is now spent making and marketing the oil and his wife, father and even the agronomist have all mucked in.

Duncan Farrington, who farms 280ha (700 acres) of combinable crops near Hargrave, Wellingborough, Northamptonshire, has taken a radical step to give him the time to focus on the oil business.

“I’m taking two years off from the farm to concentrate on the oil side, and Dad is doing more of the tractor work,” he says. “It’s not ideal, but there are only two of us running the farm and we’re not big enough to employ someone yet.”

Geoff Kilby, who grows rape and other arable crops near Collingham, West Yorkshire, started producing his Wharfe Valley Farms rapeseed oil in September 2006. It’s taking a while to get established, he says, but the business is gaining momentum nicely.

He was surprised at how expensive it was to get started. “We had to get proper shopfitters to do out the converted barn to meet food hygiene regs and sourcing a bottle we liked was a bit of a nightmare,” he says. “It’s not a quick way to make money – we probably wouldn’t have gone ahead without the DEFRA grant.”

The high labour input needed to get started in a new market wasn’t lost on Colin McGregor either. He and seven other Northumberland farmers decided that a group structure was the best way of getting the business started.

They got four groups of consumers and professional chefs to taste rapeseed oil made from 20 different rape varieties before deciding on the best one. Production of their Oleifera brand began in November 2006. They have just invested in a second, larger press and will soon have both full-time press operator and sales manager on the books.

“Once people try the oil they think it’s fantastic,” he says. “It has been bloody hard work, it’s dominated our life and we’ve invested a six-figure sum in it. I think it would be very difficult for an individual to do it.”

Building up a customer base came a bit more easily to George Munns, who farms a county council holding near Chatteris, Cambridgeshire.

As well as growing 200ha (500 acres) of arable crops, he also rears 1000 geese a year for the Christmas market and sells them through 50 butchers. They were an obvious asset when it came to stocking his Munns cold-pressed rapeseed oil in December 2006. “It was on a sale-or-return basis, but no-one returned it,” he says.

He chose to use a contract presser to extract and bottle his rapeseed oil – a safer option, he felt, than spending £30,000-£40,000 on a press and bottler. He still had to put a lot of effort into marketing, though.

“I’ve stood in shops giving out free 20ml samples to people – 10,000 in all. I also had to produce 16,000 leaflets,” he says. “I think there was an image problem to start with. Rape conjures up images of hay fever, GM, subsidies and biofuels for some people, whereas olive oil has this romantic image. It’s taking a while to get established but I think it could be a reasonable business in time.”

With any fledgling – and fast-moving – market, deciding how big a player you want to be is always a dilemma.

Most of the producers started off with local sales through farm shops, delis and farmers’ markets. Some (though not all) have aspirations to sell nationally though that often means investing in bigger machinery and taking on staff to push up output.

Two of the brands, Sam Fairs’ Hill Farm Oils and Duncan Farrington’s Mellow Yellow, are now stocked nationally by Waitrose and Hamish Campbell is selling his R-Oil brand in most of Budgen’s 150 stores. But not all the farmers want to go down the supermarket route with its high demand and sometimes slender margins.

Whatever the growing pains, the transformation from commodity crop producers to cutting-edge culinary oil manufacturers has been an extraordinary learning process for all those involved. And they’re plainly enjoying the novelty of selling a product that customers are delighted to buy.

WANT TO SEE MORE?

• Hill Farm Oils (Suffolk) www.hillfarmoils.com
  
• R-Oil (Gloucestershire) www.r-oil.co.uk
  
• Oleifera (Northumberland) www.oleifera.co.uk
  
• Mellow Yellow (Northamptonshire) www.farrington-oils.co.uk
  
• Munns (Cambridgeshire) www.laemunns.com
  
• Wharfe Valley Farms (West Yorkshire) www.wharfevalleyfarms.co.uk