Yahoo Finance Behind the brand: Sandford Orchards, top UK cider producer
Barny Butterfield is founder and CEO of Sandford Orchards, the Devon-based cider makers. Now with 30 staff, Sandford produces 7 million pints of cider annually, with a turnover of around £5m ($6.1m).
“There wasn’t a lack of demand, just a lack of supply," says chief cidermaker Barny Butterfield, recalling a time 20 years ago when larger drinks companies ruled the shelves. “If you didn’t like Blackthorn or Strongbow, it was tough luck.”
Butterfield, a Devon native, admits today that he ended up founding a cider company by accident and had no initial plan for Sandford Orchards, which now produces more than 2 million gallons each year.
“I was a farm labourer on £3 an hour and I had to make my own entertainment,” he admits. “Being on a rugby team we drank everything I made in the first year by mid summer. We gave the first batch of cider to them to see whether people could survive drinking it as a robust sample. The next year I had to make more and I have done so every year since."
Spool back to 2009 and cider was still a hobby for Butterfield. Once he took over the tenancy of the farm where he still works today it gave him the space and energy to focus on the business.
Read more: Behind the brand: Union Hand-Roasted Coffee, from wooden shed to speciality success
“I didn’t think so at the time but I was incredibly self-important about it,” he says of his commitment to quality, “but I suspect people made more money at a car boot sale on a Sunday. I was wasting time but investing time. I was learning my straps and putting in the hours.”
Far from a naturally gifted businessman, Butterfield says that an unbridled love of cider has ensured a year-on-year rise in sales, understanding his business more and, crucially, employing better staff than him.
He says: “We only exist to make great cider as a business if we can successfully sell great cider, make a profit and be in business the next year. It’s always been that way round. It’s never contrived as a mechanism to make money, but thankfully it pays 30 salaries and is a busy and profitable business. But it’s taken many years to get there.”
Indeed, he didn’t employ a sales person, nor have a strategy for it, for the first 14 years of the business, instead focusing on the demand for quality. “We kept making more and people asked for more,” he adds. “That was how poorly served the market was. The peculiarities of supply and the way in which markets are served can be the reason why a product isn’t available or well adopted.
“I didn’t pay myself for the first 18 years of the business and the farm had to cover the electric bill. And now? It’s fun having a successful product, especially if people tell you as much. For a fragile ego like mine, you thrive off that.”
While they have orchards in Sandford, a "big milestone" arrived when Butterfield was handed the keys to the Cider Works in Crediton, a site where apples have grown since Victorian times. Producing on such a historical area, Butterfield now aims for Sandford to be “accessible, profitable and not overcharging”.
“Cider is a wonderfully delicious but very democratic drink,” he says. “It’s not high margin and coming from the West Country, you don’t make a load of profit.
“The important part of that story is getting to a sufficient scale that suddenly the sums add up. I knew that would have to be the journey. I was never going to change the recipe and I had to supply the market at a price that it was happy to pay, not a fictional notional price based on your own value of your own time.
Read more: Behind the brand: How ufurnish.com is creating a Rightmove for furniture sales
“A lot of small food and drink and other producers, I fear, decide to denote a value to their time and work out their pricing accordingly. And that’s why a lot aren’t successful.”
After his early lean years producing cider on the side of farming, Butterfield now has a wealth of business lessons he would use today if he was just starting out on the cider journey.
“I could always understand why I would want to borrow money against capital items and buy a bigger bottling machine or more tanks,” he admits. “I now have an amazing team and if I could go back 10 years I would take the risk on them, have that level of quality around me at that point and we would have grown much faster.
“I would have been braver and employ better people on better money as part of that risk capital. Seeing your staff as capital is something I would change. That‘s not to say the guys we had on board were underperforming. It was me who was doing that by not giving them the support of better people.
“There is a strong argument that the business is here despite me, not because of me. I’m glad I started early, I was in my early 20s when I began the journey. But, goodness, in the right hands we would have got here a lot sooner. We had all the ingredients but if I want to make myself feel better? Well, we took the journey at the speed we were able to and went through it together. But I’m a fraction more realistic than that.”
Following their 20th anniversary, Sandford Orchards, which invested over £1.2m into the business in 2020, could easily double production this year, but Butterfield says the company is in “no mad rush”.
“We are growing faster now than ever in our history,” he adds. “We grew by 25% over the last 12 months and we are way in front of the market. It has been static or declining, but clearly there is a resonance with better quality cider. We’ve always had that but now we have a brilliant team to deliver to a wider market.”
Behind the brand: Barny Butterfield on...
Work-life philosophy
“People talk about work-life balance as if work is on one side of the balance and life is on the other and you need to have enough in your life going on so that you’re not weighed down by work.
I utterly refute that, it’s an insane way of looking at the world. We spend so long at work, it’s an intrinsic part of life. Even though we were once getting it wrong, we were having a lot of fun. I don’t regret doing it but now I would do lots of things differently. Almost everything.”
Industry challenges
"The government is reviewing the duty structure where cider is getting a real roasting due to higher alcohol in traditional ciders.
Cider is a uniquely British product (half of all cider in the world is drunk in the UK).
If they choose to make those styles of ciders too expensive to be enjoyed by the local market, they wouldn't be made for an export market.
What could be the west country’s version of Scottish whisky — we have the orchards, cider makers and mills — we could be sending this incredible liquid around the world, but the threat is that cider makers will stop the product and with that the trees and the history."
Watch: Is it financially worth going to university?
Download the Yahoo Finance app, available for Apple and Android.
