The Farmers Larder meat vending venture proving a cut above for farmers
A collaboration of six nature-friendly Yorkshire Dales farmers has reported a strong start to a certified Pasture for Life meat vending machine venture.
Members of The Farmers Larder, which received Farming In Protected Landscapes Programme funding from the Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority to help establish the venture, said the first six months of sales from the machine they supply with a wide range of cuts had surpassed expectations.
The collective, which will present details of the enterprise at the Yorkshire Farming Conference in January, supplies the machine on a rota with outdoor-bred grass-finished beef and products such as hogget.
Products are labelled with the farm where they have come from to promote each member for such ventures as educational visits.
The machine comprises every cut of meat, ranging from steaks to shin, as well as an increasing selection of value-added products, such as hogget burgers and beef koftas, while the offal is sold to a local restaurant.
As part of the group’s ambition to use all of the animal, the farmers are considering introducing bone broth and tallow to the machine, situated at the Courtyard Dairy, which is also a specialist cheese shop and cheese maturer.
Speaking after staging an event “to celebrate local, nutritious food whilst learning more about how it is produced”, featuring farmers and businesses based at Courtyard Dairy, one of the members, James Newhouse of Megs Farm, Long Preston, said: “We always talk about diversity, whether that’s in the sward, our animals or businesses, but if people want to buy individual cuts of our meat, they can only buy a box or go to a restaurant. Another way of doing that without having a shop was a vending machine.
“It’s based at the Courtyard Dairy because the footfall there is massive; for us, the location was key.
“We’re slowly growing as a team. Sales have gone really well. At the start we had no clue as to how much we would sell. We’re hoping that all of us will have cycled our supply to the vend within a year.
“If we’d thought that would have been an option at the start, we would have been really happy with it, but I think you need a year’s worth of data to see whether it’s going to be good enough or not.”
Regenerative farmer Mr Newhouse said the vending machine, which is linked to an app which analyses sales, made it both quick and simple to respond to demand.
He added: “If people say we really like the shin, it’s easy to adapt, as we can talk to our butcher and change it. The great thing is that it is a different outlet to the normal. If the auction price drops for animals, the ones we put through the vend can be more of a constant.
“We price ourselves alongside supermarkets, but we don’t have middlemen. We literally take our animals to the abattoir, the butcher and straight to the vend.”
Asked whether he would recommend it to other farmers, Mr Newhouse said: “I’d say do it, but not on your own, as it’s complicated, and with a few of you the load can be shared.”