Yeo Valley is a privately owned family business founded by Roger and Mary Mead when they bought Holt Farm, Somerset in 1961, with 35 cows. Today the Yeo Valley business is still owned by the Mead family and its employees in the Yeo Valley Employee Trust.
With 60 years of farming in the valley, as the things we made 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.
‘Yeo Valley’ is proud to keep dairy British and has been making yogurts since 1976. Without the success of producing yogurts ‘Yeo Valley’ would not have been able to set up what is now Britain’s largest organic brand and a much-loved household name – Yeo Valley Organic.
Yeo Valley Organic was created over 30 years ago in 1994. All Yeo Valley Organic products are 100% organic and governed by a legal framework certified by the Soil Association.
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.
Organic is the gold standard and delivers a breadth of benefits across our whole food system for both people and planet. This is the assurance you get from Yeo Valley Organic products as well as being made by an independent family-owned British company, who remain as committed today as 30-years ago to offer organic products that are easily available in UK supermarkets.