Regional player Brymor Ice Cream has boosted its production capacity as it gears up to win over the multiples' buyers with its unique Guernsey flavour. Michael Barker reports


It's the sixty four million dollar question for any small food supplier. You've found a niche, built local listings and now you want to roll out further. But how do you persuade the multiples to stock your product nationwide?

One small player grappling with this conundrum is Brymor Ice Cream, a £1.5m Yorkshire Dales-based company, which has built a reputation in the region as a producer of distinctive, premium ice cream.

The company has dabbled in most things dairy over the years, beginning in 1982 as a milk producer, before the introduction of EU quotas forced it to look for alternative outlets for its milk.

Having decided cheese wasn't the best way forward in a region famous for Wensleydale and Swaledale, it turned its attention to premium ice cream in 1984. It has built up a loyal local fan base and currently supplies a total of 450 customers in the Yorkshire region, including Morrisons, The Co-operative Group and Waitrose, delis, restaurants and tourist attractions. It also has a 150-seat ice cream parlour that brings in 250,000 visitors a year.

Now the company wants to go national. With a portfolio of 35 varieties that includes everything from chocolate and strawberry to more esoteric options such as Cinderella (caramel with toffee pieces and hazelnut crunch) and Supergold (vanilla ice cream with pecan nuts, toffee, chocolate and a caramel sauce), owner Rob Moore (pictured) thinks Brymor should be jostling for position with Unilever, Fredericks and R&R on supermarket shelves across the land.

"It's difficult to break out of your area," he admits. "We've had natural expansion without really pushing it, and good coverage in a 100-mile radius. Now we would love to get it nationwide."

Thanks to a base recipe devised for Brymor's Guernsey cow milk by James Rothwell, a food alchemist from the Ice Cream Alliance, Brymor has a taste profile that sets it apart from mainstream rivals, says Moore. "It's not an off-the-shelf recipe," he boasts. "It's creamy, smooth and moreish, with good texture."

He concedes that Brymor has chosen a challenging time to up the ante. The premium ice cream sector suffered a 1.2% volume decline in the 52 weeks to 14 June [TNS]. Brymor is competitive on price, with a one-litre tub retailing for less than £3. It is this combination of value with a premium taste, along with a recently beefed-up production capacity, that has persuaded Moore now is the time to go national.

"Over the past three years we have invested £250,000 and updated our production," he says. "Manufacturing is not a problem. We have the latest machines, we are skimming 6,000 litres of milk a day and we can produce 2,000 tubs an hour."

Brymor has come out of its shell this year with the appointment of a PR man to give it national media coverage, while it has also begun making appearances and winning awards at events such as the Great Taste Awards.

And that wider focus is driving the push to make Moore's dream of seeing his products on shelves across the UK a reality.