Yorkshire PEAS seal deal with Tesco

The UKs first fully farmer-owned brand of fine peas has succeeded in signing a major deal with Britains biggest supermarket, Tesco.

The contract, will put the brand of frozen peas initially into 165 stores across theNorth of England.

The brand is owned by Swaythorpe Growers, a consortium of 40 Yorkshire pea farmers, who are also in talks with other supermarkets and independent retailers.

Swaythorpe Growers director Matthew Hayward said: Its a huge coup for us to sign this deal with Tesco. Wed spotted the rise in demand for locally-produced food and thought that trend could easily extend to the freezer. So far, most brands that trumpet their local status are specialist and expensive we wanted to take the local message to the everyday foods that the shopper can find in the freezer.

The farmers that make up the consortium had been growing peas for a number of retail and foodservice outlets, but they shared a wish to move away from commodity farming into something they had more control over.

Simon Dryell, Senior Buying manager from Tesco said of the deal, We aredelighted that Tesco isthe first retailer to launch frozen Yorkshire Peas. 44% of our customers are buying more local products than they were 5 years ago and what better way to do it than to support 40 local farmers producing a product of great quality and freshness – the peas are frozen with 3 hours of being picked!We think they will be a great success and are proud to add them to our Yorkshire range.

Swaythorpe Growers pride themselves on full transparency in farming and freezing. The peas are all grown by family farms based on the Yorkshire Wolds and then processed locally at a factory owned by one of the growers, giving the farmers direct control over every step of the process.

Matthew added: We know that shoppers are keen to support British farmers but we also know that those same people will always have a bag of generic frozen peas in their freezer theres very little in this category thats clearly British.

We firmly believe that local food neednt be confined to a few muddy carrots at the local farm shop. This is real life and we want to give consumers the chance to directly support small scale family farming.

Weve always been proud of what we grow, but selling peas with our name on the packet has genuinely taken farming to a new level for us. Developing something grown, harvested processed and marketed by ourselves brings immense satisfaction. The peas taste pretty good too, even if I say so myself.