York Farm, Boroughbridge: Farm venture launches novel diversification enterprise

It is hoped the significant investment at Yolk Farm in Minskip Road, Boroughbridge, which opened the world’s first egg restaurant on a free range egg farm in 2020 alongside a farm shop, children’s play barn and animal petting attraction, will further the drive of Mrs Mosey and her husband Ben to connect people with their food.

While customers will be able to eat pizzas in the restaurant or be served takeaway, they will also be offered the opportunity to play games at the attraction or relax by its beach area.

Development of a new nursery school is also anticipated to increase footfall to the site, benefiting all aspects of the business.

Mrs Mosey said: “The way we have innovated since we’ve been here has often been in response to challenges, like Covid and the cost of living, and this one is in some ways a response to the National Insurance raise. We firmly believe cutting back on our team or diminishing the quality of our customer experience is not the right approach.

“We obviously need to make more money as a business and rather than reducing operations, cutting staff or reducing our customer service we always try and look at innovation and offer more to our customers so they come and spend more money.”

Mrs Mosey said a big proportion of Yolk Farm’s profits would be effectively taken away by the National Insurance raise and those profits were usually earmarked for re-investment.

She said: “There is a catalogue of things going on for small businesses at the moment and businesses of our size run under the Government radar in many ways. If you employ under ten people there’s protections for National Insurance, they give a relief, while bigger businesses are more able to stomach these costs.

"We’ve also got the minimum wage increase, changes to business rates will see relief for hospitality and retail has gone from 75 per cent to 40 per cent, the inheritance tax rise for farms and other rising costs. It’s a very challenging environment at the moment. At Yolk Farm, we are committed to navigating these challenges while staying true to our values and the team we’ve built.”

Mrs Mosey, who attended last week’s Farm Retail Association conference in Birmingham, said: “They were all quite scared about the next 12 months. People are more scared than I’ve ever seen them. We are at the sharp end of a lot of those costs.

“What we were all talking about was that at least we are in a position where we can change some of our costs quite quickly. We’ve got advantages over much bigger businesses in that we can make decisions and come up with crazy ideas like the pizza restaurant and implement them fairly quickly.”

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