Yeo Valley is a privately owned family business.
The Yeo Valley business is owned by the Mead family and its employees in the Yeo Valley Employee Trust. Roger and Mary Mead founded the company by purchasing Holt Farm in Somerset in 1961, with 35 cows and we created the Yeo Valley Organic brand in 1994.
As the things we make became more popular, we couldn’t supply all the milk we needed from our own cows. So, over the years, we’ve formed partnerships and pooled our resources with other British organic dairy farmers in co-operatives (where the farmers jointly own the business that collects, sells and sometimes processes the milk). The original co-operatives were OMSCO (the Organic Milk Suppliers Co-operative) and Milk Link. Milk Link is now a part of Arla, a co-operative of farmers which originally started in 1881 in Sweden and in the UK in the 1990s.
We have a long-held ambition to grow organic dairy in the UK, because we believe that organic dairy is better for the planet, the cows and for our own health. Currently in the UK, only 5% of milk sold in the UK fresh milk market is organic, which is significantly lower than in Europe.
In 2018, we granted Arla the rights to pack milk, butter and cheese in the UK, supplied by their British organic farmers. The partnership with Arla organic farmers means that we are well placed to continue to grow the organic milk market, while remaining a privately owned family business.
With one in four households now purchasing organic products, there is opportunity for the UK dairy sector to convert more of its customers from standard to organic dairy, which we feel is important for the health of the planet, people and importantly the cows. To fuel this growth and meet the growing needs of consumers requires investment and innovation and we hope that you can see this taking place at Yeo Valley Organic with the introduction of many new Yeo Valley Organic products and packaging advances in the past year.
We’re determined to make organic dairy products more available across the UK and we’re proud to support over 100 British organic dairy farmers who supply us with milk.
All our products are produced using British Organic milk and certified by the Soil Association which means it is food you can trust governed by legislation.