Yo! yeo Robin Maynard discovers the story behind the label

摘要

If you stand on the ridge overlooking Somerset's Yeo Valley, you can glimpse the barn where it all began. In the 1970s, farmers Roger and Mary Mead used it to serve cream teas to holidaymakers. Not wanting to waste the left-over skimmed milk, they turned it into yogurt. Three decades later, the family-owned Yeo Valley Organic is the UK's most successful organic brand and dairy company. Below the ridge lies Blagdon Lake, white as milk in the sunlight, leading to idle speculation about how much yogurtit would hold at Yeo Valley's current output. From a small-is-beautiful point of view, Yeo Valley is a high-volume UK supermarket supplier at 3 million pots of organic yogurt a week. But that is still modest compared to the multinational giants. As such,it encapsulates the challenge faced by organic businesses: how to build a mass market without compromising family farms, the lifeblood of the organic movement. So far Yeo Valley has done both by supporting local producers, and holding market share against acquisitive competitors.