CATHERINE
MEAD
We catch up with Catherine Mead OBE, owner of Lynher Dairies, home of the famous Cornish Yarg and Cornish Kern cheeses. Catherine explains how a tumultuous last few years has impacted her business and the wider agricultural sector as a whole, and she looks forward to the return of the Royal Cornwall Show.
Catherine
Mead
We first interviewed you in Business Cornwall magazine 14 years ago. I guess much has changed since those days?
Like most other people, I’m challenged to think back more than two years! And I doubt if in 14 years, we’ve had as much change as we’ve had in the last two or three years! What with Brexit, the pandemic, and now the war in Ukraine. Crikey! The things we’ve all had to deal with, in different ways, Brexit, Covid and war are absolutely extraordinary. Brexit, you could prepare for to an extent. But the other two, obviously you couldn’t. We always knew Brexit
10 | BUSINESS CORNWALL
was happening, didn’t we, right back from 2016, we knew Brexit was coming. And there was a lot of hope and optimism that it wouldn’t affect us too badly. I think in the food industry we’ve been quite badly affected by things like import tariffs, quotas and by currency which has been quite a significant problem in export. And then of course, by the lack of Eastern European workers, which has really been bad for food and farming. Recruitment is an enormous problem for us now. And then, a year after Brexit hit, the pandemic came along. How did that impact business?
Gosh, it was such a roller coaster. We were supplying supermarket deli counters and they went. We supplied airlines, they went. We supplied restaurants. They went. We had quite a lot of work with Premier League; there weren’t any football matches. We were exporting and there were problems with export into both Australia and America, for varying reasons. So we had this really
dramatic period where everything looked absolutely cataclysmic. And we did lose 30% of our sales in 2020, it was really quite a significant drop. So, the dairy had to work in a completely different way. It becomes a moment where you take a step back and think about how you want the business to be going forward. It gave us a chance to think about the business and what kind of market do we want to work in. How do we want to work going forward? And so, a lot of that business that we lost, we didn’t necessarily go rushing to get back. And furthermore, we replaced it with other business of the kind that we really wanted to be working with. So it was definitely a case of swings and roundabouts. And in the face of adversity, good things can happen. There were definitely some positives, as I think many people would say. Well, this was really hard work, but actually, this happened. And that was quite good for us. So it has been a very difficult couple of years because of its volatility and uncertainty. It took about 18 months, through to probably September 2021, before we felt really confident in what
