Meet the member:
The Little Herb Farm

The Little Herb Farm started out as a market stall at the Farmers Market selling herbs which the previous owner grew in her garden in Pittenweem. When she decided to go back to her original career, I took on the concept as I just loved the name!

Having left my teaching career in order to care for my daughter who was receiving long-term medical care at Ninewells in Dundee, I was looking for something to bring in a little extra money for the family that I could do around hospital stays and caring from my young family, who at the time were 8, 7, 3 and 1 years old. I made The Little Herb Farm into a limited company in March 2014 and decided to concentrate on making fruit and herb vinegars and a couple of jams, using home-grown herbs and local berries. The turning point for the business came when I took a stand at the Speciality Food Show in Glasgow in 2015. Attending the show with only one or two local stockists, I acquired 20 new customers over the course of the three day show which led me to double my turnover from year 1 to year 2!

11 and a half years on, we no longer make the fruit vinegars I started with but make a range of houmous and vegetable dips (11 flavours in total), 6 different sauces, over 30 different jams, curds, marmalades and chutney and we also work alongside a local vegetable grower steaming vegetables for them daily to use in their own products.

I bought over both The Whisky Sauce Co (in 2019) and Sarah Gray’s jams (end of 2022). Both of these businesses had been known to me for a while and both were local to me. Both owners were retiring but neither wanted to see the brands they had worked so hard on disappear. I had many of the same customers that they did and both myself and Sarah Gray’s worked with the same distributor, The Cress Company. I saw the brands as great add-ons to my existing products and sending multiple items to customers rather than just a few, helps with delivery costs and also helps the customer meet minimum delivery requirements.

My business, up until I bought Whisky Sauce Co in 2019, was very seasonal with a huge amount of production needed in the summer months but very little requirement in winter. With a small but loyal team, I needed to make sure the work was consistent for them year round so taking on ambiently stable products to run alongside the short shelf life chilled range worked very well. Running a business that produces multiple lines is not easy but my team are great and everyone that works here has been here a while, so they know what they are doing, which is just as well as sometimes with so much going on, I can forget things!

The overriding concept of the business is to produce high quality products that can become household favourites without breaking the bank. We try to make everything as tasty as we can and I am proud of what we have achieved. We have adapted recipes along the way and come up with many new products which we all enjoy. Not everything has made it onto the shelves but we always have fun tasting and coming up with new ideas!

Local was everything to start with, we grew our own herbs and bought berries from surrounding farms in Fife and Tayside. As the business has expanded we have had to source from further afield. We still do buy as much locally as possible but demand and price have meant we cannot sustain the business relying on local alone.

We recycle everything we possibly can. We have separate industrial wastebins for paper and carboard, metals, food waste and general waste. We have virtually no waste from the making of the products, carefully working out what ingredients we need for each week to ensure nothing is wasted at the end. Jam is especially easy as it is mainly just fruit and sugar, so no ingredients need to be binned there. We freeze berries to use out of season, only defrosting what we need each day.

All our packaging is recyclable so the end customer can dispose of it in an environmentally friendly way. We use recycled paper to pack around our fragile products to ensure they travel safely.

We have 9 employees now. I hired my first member of staff in 2016 and she is still with me today! Initially, it was an all-female staff, mainly as I was happy to work around school hours to help staff with young children, so I think the job appealed more to people who wanted to work but needed to fit into the 9am to 3pm school day. Now, I have more full time staff and we are 6 women and 3 men.

I like to think I am a good boss (you would have to ask my staff!) but I try to always be kind and fair and help where I can. As a mum myself, I know all too well the juggle of work and home life and so if any of my team need to get away to pick up children or need some time off for family issues, I work really hard to accommodate that. I am proud that many of the team have worked here for years now and our turnover of staff is very low. Everyone gets on really well and I think that makes a huge difference. The work isn’t easy, it can be repetitive and challenging and stressful when big orders need to get out by certain deadlines but if you have nice people to work with and you feel valued in your workplace, I think that is hugely impactful.

When I hire in new staff, it is always with a thought to how they will gel with the current team. I believe you can teach anyone how to make food and label jars, etc. but you can’t teach someone compassion, a strong work ethic and respect for others. When I am interviewing that is what I look for rather than previous work experience in the food industry, although that is obviously a bonus. I pay for staff to gain qualifications on the job such as forklift training and food hygiene which they can then take on to other jobs in the future if they so wish.

We did a lot of markets and fairs to start with to gain recognition locally for the business but over the years we have done much less of this. My job is full time now, Monday to Friday and often I work at weekends too. With that and my family commitments, I don’t have enough time for fairs and tastings any more but I will support customers in other ways, like giving stock for free for their own tastings, etc.

I have done various collaborations over the years and we now work closely with Kettle Produce, providing a veg prep service for them. This works very well for both us and them as they are only a couple of miles along the road from us.

The Little Herb Farm has grown hugely since 2014. We now turn in a week what we turned in our first year! Hard work is what has made the business successful, that and taking calculated risks and being very careful with money! I am probably a little too cautious by nature and I have had to learn to take more risks over the years. There have been tough times but loyal customers and great staff have made all the difference.

We sell UK wide and have customers in America and New Zealand. Working with distributors like The Cress Company, Williamsons Food Service and Stewarts of Glencarse has been instrumental in getting my products out as far as we can. We also do a lot of own label work for other companies which is hugely complicated but has been rewarding.

I guess I just know what I like and hope other people feel the same! When we come up with a new product, everyone here has to taste it. If everyone likes it, it is a go-er! I do have to be overruled when it comes to spice though as I am not great with that so anything I think is too spicy usually is not spicy enough! I encourage the staff to come up with ideas themselves and am open to trying anything. Generally, I track sales and see what flavours are most popular and use that as a guide when adding new products to the various brands. Tracking sales also allows me to see quickly when a certain product or flavour isn’t doing well. There’s no point in continuing to make something that no-one wants to buy! I try not to take anything personally. I may love a product but if it doesn’t sell then it doesn’t have a place in the portfolio.

The jam sector in particular is a very crowded market. Most shops want to buy locally produced so it precludes you from many areas. Not much demand for Scottish jam in the Lake District for example! It is tough to stand out because ultimately jam is a very simple recipe so jams of the same flavour from different producers can all taste very similar. Price is key. There is only so much someone will pay for a tub of houmous or a jar of strawberry jam so we need to be competitive while also making sure we can cover our overheads. It is tricky as everyone wants high quality and locally sourced but very few would pay the true cost of that, especially when you can buy jam from the supermarket for a fraction of the cost. You would think exotic flavours would be a good avenue to go down but our best sellers are our Raspberry Jam and our Plain Houmous! We have some more interesting combinations like our Chipotle Chilli Jam and our Spinach and Feta dip but these lines are slow and steady ones.

Being a sole owner of the business can be hard. Not having someone to talk through problems or worries with is tough and a little lonely. My poor husband hears about a lot of it but he isn’t in the industry nor does he work for himself so can’t fully understand. That is where relationships with other food producers can be invaluable. I have one friend in particular who I talk a lot to and they are brilliant as they fully get what I am saying!

Collaborations and relationships with other producers can also be beneficial when sourcing new customers as often we will put in a good word for each other. I have asked for help from other jam producers and I have given help to other companies when I have been asked as really I think we all just want each other to succeed. It is a tough line of work and supporting each other is very important.

I am not sure I have overcome them all! I think the steep learning curve has been one of the hardest things. Coming from a background in education, this is very different! My parents have been a great support system for me. They had a restaurant and their own business so they have great insight into some of the nuances of the industry. They have helped me with VAT and PAYE as I hadn’t a clue! My mum helps with the books for the business and both she and my dad have a wealth of knowledge which I am very lucky to be able to tap in to.

Another big challenge is keeping afloat financially. In the last decade, we have seen Brexit, a global pandemic, the war in Ukraine, huge hikes in electricity prices and NI contributions plus wage increases and most recently the new packaging tax. Not an easy time for any business! We sign contracts for fixed periods and it can be very hard (if not impossible) to raise your price during that time so you can’t react quickly with price increases in response to price rises in raw materials etc. Often you have to just absorb the costs until you can raise your price which for small businesses can break you. Having a positive and healthy cashflow is key.

I keep saying I am going to slow down, just let the business evolve organically but I am ambitious and driven and do lie awake at night thinking about how I can do more! Perhaps that is the responsibility that all employers feel, but I worry about making sure there is enough business to keep everyone’s jobs. I want to show my children that hard work can pay off and that you shouldn’t be afraid to do something out-with your comfort zone or skill set just because it is tough. I never switch off, even on holiday I am texting work! I want to provide a good life for my family and build something I am proud of. I won’t ever come up with the next big thing but I hope that steadily providing good service and high quality products will keep my business going another 11 years, and beyond.

Meeting other producers has been great and also Emma is great at finding opportunities for us members. She has helped me gain a great contract this year for my jam & chutney worth over £25,000  and I am very grateful to her for it. Having an organisation locally that is so keen to support local producers is great. I do not use the service enough; I would love to network more and get more involved but my time is so limited that I can only hope to be more active in the future.

Don’t be afraid to give it a go. If you have a product you love, others will love it too. Build slowly and steadily, too much too quick and you won’t keep up and then you will let customers down or stress yourself out too much! Be keen with pricing; value your time and add it to the cost of your product and remember while you may be happy with the margin you are making selling direct, once you get bigger and have to involve third party sellers (like distributors) or couriers, you need to have enough margin to give them their share and still make money for yourself. You can always lower your price to give incentive to larger customers who bulk order but you can rarely increase your price so it is imperative to take time to get it right first time. Don’t be rushed into giving a price, it is ok to say you will come back to the customer on pricing when they make an initial enquiry. Keep a certain amount in your bank at all times, even if it is only enough to cover 1 month’s expenses. Great cashflow will keep your business afloat even if a customer is late in paying or you need to buy ingredients for a large order a month or two before you get paid for that order, you need to ensure you have funds to cover such things.