Far from cordial: Belvoir Farm’s Pev Manners on Labour’s ‘thugs’

Belvoir Farm boss Pev Manners was fired from his first job as a young City stockbroker for having ideas above his station.

The decision may have been too hasty: Manners has since turned his father’s fruit-picking sideline into a £25m turnover success story, exporting to nearly 30 countries across the globe.

Then again, there is simply too much inherent mischief and entrepreneurial zeal behind the twinkly eyes of this 61-year-old to be content among grey men in the City.

Lately, the fire in his belly has been directed at the government’s controversial extended producer responsibility scheme. Along with Fentimans boss Ian Bray, he has been leading warnings about the potentially disastrous impact.

Speaking from a Belvoir Farm estate in the Midlands – currently submerged in five inches of snow – he voices fears Defra has been hoodwinked by major drinks companies. And the “money grab” packaging tax will have lasting repercussions for smaller setups such as his, he believes.

For him, EPR is a catastrophe in waiting for family firms. He is “stunned” at how supine trade bodies have been, including the British glass industry.

“They put out a rather crap statement yesterday, which I’ve been reading, and it doesn’t even get close to explaining just how bad this policy is,” he says.

“The government just aren’t listening, they are completely dead. This is all about big money, they want to get money to local authorities, and they want companies to pay for it. It’s a tax and it’s going to drive the wrong environmental behaviours, not the right ones.”

The eye-watering charges estimated for glass – between £110 and £215 per tonne – will drive the market towards PET products, argues Manners. In the majority of cases, these contain artificially sweetened drinks that, in his words, “taste terrible and aren’t healthy”.

“The Coke and Pepsi boys have done a brilliant lobby job on Defra with tears in their eyes, saying we can’t afford to set up a deposit return scheme unless we get a holiday from EPR,” he rants.

“So although the whole DRS thing is up in the air, the Cokes and Pepsis of this world are [getting off] scot-free on EPR. It’s totally anti-competitive. I think there is a lawsuit here and I’m going to talk to people and see what we can drum up.

“There is no leadership being provided by the BSDA because they are entirely funded by the big PET boys. I’ve been screaming at them, are you the association of plastics and artificial sweeteners, or are you the British Soft Drinks Association?”

Manners has a warm and natural wit, and an Eton education under his belt. So he manages to make all this highly entertaining – but make no mistake, he believes the consequences are deadly serious.

He estimates the company will take a £750,000 hit from EPR, adding 10% on to the price of a bottle and wiping up to 80% off its profits. Sales of larger bottles are estimated to be hit by between 10 and 20%.

“Adding 25p to a bottle is inflationary and anti-competitive yet because of the farcical system Defra is using for deciding the fees we still have no idea what the final cost will be, even though EPR comes in next year. It’s barmy.

“I’m on my knees begging the government to change this policy because it’s a monster, it’s so big”.

“But Defra just don’t understand the impact of this stuff. They sit in their ivory tower in Westminster and they don’t get that this is genuinely frightening.”

A ‘tribal’ government

For Manners, there are parallels between this issue and the farmer protests. Since the budget announcement, he has watched with concern how quickly the Labour government’s relationship with farmers has gone into freefall.

“They [the government] are behaving like a tribal bunch of thugs, with their trade unionism and old-fashioned Labour morals and they don’t understand the world has moved on since the 1970s.

“They think all farmers are rich. I’m a farmer and our farm has made nothing, it’s made zero profit in the last 10 years because of natural disasters and massively increasing costs. In a world where everybody is trying to rape farming, the government can’t as well. It’s insane.”

More Big Interviews:

• Alex Troughton: the ‘grocery addict’ driving Uber Eats

• ‘All I think about is retail media’: SMG and the billion-pound opportunity

• Can David Milner work his magic again with Crosta & Mollica?

• Caterfood MD Phil Atyeo on running a different kind of buying group

As Manners explains, it’s increasingly tough making money on the 2,500-acre farm that is home to the business – despite being tenants of “posh landowner cousins” who own the historic castle and tourist attraction next door.

“Farming incomes are under attack, farmers are on their knees, it’s an absolutely horrible business at the moment,” says Manners.

“But that is exactly how we started. We were an arable farm that looked to diversify. Dad started as a fruit farmer in the mid-70s thinking that all the people looking around the heritage property at the castle would obviously like to buy a punnet of strawberries on the way home.”

The start of a cordial empire

It was his mother Mary who sowed the seed for the cordials empire. She began selling a handmade elderflower cordial to visitors and friends, which proved a massive hit.

“Mum was making about 50 bottles of this stuff and all our friends started asking for it. They said, ‘Are you charging for it?’

“Then Dad asked the killer question: ‘Do you think we could start charging for it?’

“I came back from university to find mum and dad in an elderflower bush and I was told to do the same. We started picking elderflowers, that year in 1984. We picked again in 1985 and I joined Dad in 1992.”

“The Cokes and Pepsis of this world are getting off scot-free on EPR. It’s totally anti-competitive”

At that point, Manners had carved out a successful career in marketing with tobacco giant Rothmans International. He has no regrets about leaving to answer his father’s call.

“He told me was leaving it all to me. He said, ‘After all, this is yours so you’ve got to come and help me.

“In those days, the farm made quite a bit of money. It was very well run. But I looked at the sales graph for the cordials and it was through the roof going gangbusters. It was staggering. It just needed co-ordination and marketing skills, which is exactly what I’d been learning with the tobacco guys.”

Help from Lady Sainsbury

Not that the business was entirely fledgling. Belvoir Farm had already started making inroads into retailers before Manners came on board, thanks to the family’s relentless touring of craft fairs and country shows – and a chance word in the ear of Lady Sainsbury.

“Dad had got into eight stores in Sainsbury’s in 1982 because one of the TV chefs called Jocelyn Dimbleby (mother of Henry) had told Lady Sainsbury that she should sell our elderflower cordial.

“So Lady Sainsbury told Lord Sainsbury, who told his buyers to get it into a few shops to shut his wife up. That’s kind of how it worked in those days.

“Anyway eight stores turned into 50, turned into 150, turned into the full chain.”

In the mid 1990s, Manners suffered “the worst day in my career” when the products were delisted by Sainsbury’s – until then, its biggest customer.

“Luckily, I opened up with Waitrose and Morrisons the same year. Now we’re in all of them except Aldi, Lidl and we don’t trade with M&S.”

Still, the Sainsbury’s delisting shook Manners, who was determined to carve out markets abroad to reduce its exposure to the volatility of the mults.

“I always said we’re going to bloody well export. I thought, right, there are supermarkets all over the world.

“Were now exporting to around 30 countries, with exports roughly 20% of the business.

Country fairs have been replaced by annual exports events, which have opened up markets in the Netherlands, Australia, US, France and Scandinavia.

Reinvestment in the brand

It’s been a measured, rather than a rapid, expansion. Manners attributes the success of the company, which walked off with the Grocer Gold Award for soft drink brand of the year in 2022, to its determination to settle for small margins and steady growth. Meanwhile, he has “reinvested every penny possible” in the brand.

In June last year, that took the form of a state-of-the-art new £1.7m canning line at its Bottesford factory to help ramp up its NPD pipeline.

Packing 50,000 cans per hour, the facility has enabled Belvoir to extend its core range of cordials with a growing lineup of on-trend mocktails, spanning products like Passionfruit Martini, Peach Bellini, and Yuzu & Lime Mojito.

“Mocktails are flying,” says Manners. “We started because we love pornstar martinis here at the farm. So we started making a non-alcoholic passionfruit martini, which is delicious, and that took off three years ago.

“Now we’ve got a range of four and we’ve just put our canned raspberry margaritas into Tesco. They’re delicious.”

The lines play to a growing trend. “Young people aren’t drinking as much as they used to. They are looking for interesting soft drink alternatives and, whilst there are some pretty awful ones out there, we are very proud of ours.”

Along with mocktails, Belvoir Farm has also “pivoted” towards anther growing trend: no added sugar cordials. They now account for 50% of the company’s annual growth, according to Manners. “We’re going to do more no added sugar drinks and more NPD next year also,” he adds.

Amid all these evolving habits, Manners hopes one won’t change: the willingness of hundreds of local residents to flock to the farm each year to pick the elderflowers used in its products. The ritual has been running since 2001, when Manners realised he couldn’t do it himself.

“We ask the locals around here to bring us elderflowers, and to our amazement every year they do.

“We pay them well, people walk off with £200 cash easily in a day, but we get lovely fresh elderflowers. This year, we had 42 tonnes brought in. That’s a hell of a lot of elderflower.”

With practices such as these, plus its own factory, Manners accepts profit margins aren’t that high. But for him, it’s a price worth paying for a strong brand.

“If you look at our accounts last year I think we made 4% profit.

“It’s very low. It’s not what most businessmen would accept but for me, it’s about building a brand. That’s what I’m trying to do: to build a brand for the long term.

“I want to have a brand that stands for something, which people trust and love.”

Now aged 61, Manners has no plans for retirement just yet. “I kind of think I can keep going for a while. My dad retired at 75 and he was still making sense at 75, although I probably won’t be.

“The idea of putting my feet up fills me with horror. I can’t think of anything more boring. I spoke to the CEO of a business who retired a couple of years ago and he said: ‘God, retirement’s dull.’”

“You can look at your Porsche a few times, but when you get a rocket from your wife about not having put the bins out when she gets back from Sainsbury’s, it sort of brings you back to earth when you used to have 200 people reporting to you.”

It’s that sort of unreconstructed charisma, delivered with country gent charm, that makes Manners such an entertaining interviewee. Although it’s a fair bet the good souls of Defra won’t find his company quite so cordial in the months to come.