Big Interview

VENERABLE CIDER COMPANY MOVES WITH THE TIMES

BY HELEN COMPSON

Rooted in the soil of Herefordshire for five generations now, multi-award winning Westons Cider yet proved fleet of foot in adapting to the exigencies of the pandemic.

Within weeks of its descent, the management team had ramped up the online business 20 fold, all the while adjusting the nature of the stock they held. Darryl Hinksman, Head of Business Development, said: “It’s been quite remarkable. From March last year, since we first went into lockdown, we met as a leadership team every day for the first hundred days. “We made a lot of changes! We worked through the whole process, from the production line to the focus of our stock-keeping.” Westons was forewarned and as a result, forearmed, when Darryl got a taste of things to come in early 2020. He was in Australia, looking after the company’s antipodean brewery, when Covid-19 began to emerge. “I flew out of Melbourne just as it went into lockdown and I got back saying ‘we are going to follow suit’,” he said. “There was an almost instant recognition that business had to change and we pretty much got on with it.” In a sure indication the team did indeed find the sweet-spot for consumers suddenly house-bound, Westons’ online turnover of yesteryear, somewhere in the region of £50,000 to £100,000 per annum, has become £1.5m. It also has 70,000 followers too, people who haven’t just clicked on ‘like’ but have also given permission for Westons to contact them with offers. While the online takings are small beer in the scale of things – the business as a whole has an annual turnover of £60m – the team recognises the shift forced on consumer trends in the past year is here to stay. “OK, yes, the on-trade business is coming back pretty swiftly as pubs and restaurants reopen,” said Darryl. “The recent spurt of good weather has certainly helped there and each time there is a lifting of restrictions, we see a bit of an uplift. “But with the way the online orders are flowing in, they will soon account for 2.5% of our overall turnover.

We made a lot of changes! We worked through the whole process, from the production line to the focus of our stock-keeping.

“Our best guess is that while people are returning to pubs and restaurants, they will probably go out less often, but will expect a premium offer when they do. For us that means they will drink less, but choose the best.” The nature and ratios of stock held have inevitably changed in line with customer demand and, in turn, the type of packaging needed. Lockdown’s root and branch reform saw the rise of the mail-order friendly bag-in-a-box and the (temporary) demise of the keg. “The bag-in-a-box range goes from three litres to 20 litres and they are best sellers, especially the 10 and 20 litre sizes,” he said. “People buy them – they’re only available online, not in supermarkets

– in the way they do larger packs for barbecues and the like. They’ve been very successful.”

Established in 1880 in rural Much Marcle, the company is now in the care of the fourth and fifth generations of the Weston family. Managing Director Helen Thomas is the great-granddaughter of founder Henry Weston.

Using the wide variety of regional fruit grown in the surrounding orchards, Henry started pressing and blending the ciders and perries that went down a treat with his thirsty neighbours. Today The Bounds, the charming 17th century farmhouse and cider mill where it all began, is still at the heart of the business.

Most of Westons’ production lines have long been in-house, all bar the canning process. But with the demand for cans growing exponentially, that process is currently being brought under the same roof as its bottling and keg-filling plants too. Thereafter one of the few manufacturing elements outsourced will be the production of the CO2 used to carbonate the cider. Even then, that is done with best sustainable practice in mind. The CO2 is produced from the apple waste, known as pomace, left from Westons’ pressings by a company with an anaerobic digester.

Looking to the future, Westons is intent on growing export sales. It already sells business to business and exports to 44 countries, key among them Germany, Scandinavia, the Baltic states and the USA. China and southeast Asia are now firmly in its sights. Darryl said: “Virtually every single country in the world grows apples and when you start to dig you find there is often an indigenous taste for some type of cider. China is the largest apple-grower in the world and has a history of cider stretching back hundreds of years. “So, we know there is a latent taste for our product in many countries we aren’t yet exporting to. It’s all about finding the right distributor to be honest.”