Farrington’s Mellow Yellow Cold Pressed Rapeseed Oil is a brilliantly healthy, versatile and tasty cooking oil. Farmer and founder, Duncan Farrington, explains how a small farm diversification ended up leading the UK’s cold pressed rapeseed oil market to a value of £11.8m (Kantar Worldpanel, Total Cold Pressed Rapeseed, 52 w/e 28th Jan 2018.)
“I was born and brought up on Bottom Farm in the beautiful Northamptonshire village of Hargrave. Following university, I joined my parents in the family business as a fourth generation farmer, but it was soon evident that farming, driving tractors and growing crops alone was not going to sustain the family business for another four generations.
Returning to my university research on rapeseed oil, a passion was awoken, which quickly turned into an obsession for the fantastic culinary properties and nutritional benefits packed in those tiny little seeds. Following years of research, I launched Farrington’s Mellow Yellow in 2005 as Britain’s first ‘seed-to-bottle’ cold pressed rapeseed oil. Our cold pressing method ensures that the natural goodness from the seeds stays in the oil, including the brilliant golden yellow colour and subtle nutty flavour.
With my mother’s help bottling the oil, I would drive around local shops in my old battered car, gaining customers who remain loyal to this day. Later in our farmhouse kitchen, my wife Eli, with her superior taste buds and trusty jam jar to hand, started creating salad dressings and mayonnaises to add to the range.
Provenance remains as important as ever and with our fantastic team, we ensure that the same passion, attention to detail and quality ingredients still goes into every bottle we make.
I am a LEAF (Linking Environment and Farming) farmer, LEAF is a charity that encourages farmers to look at the wider implications of what we do, we are at the forefront of environmentally aware agriculture. We grow our crops and work closely with our partner farmers who grow their rapeseed for us also, to produce our Mellow Yellow products to the rigorously assessed LEAF Marque Standards. Using sustainable crop rotations, fertility building green manure and companion crops, we are able to nurture and improve our soil and ecosystem.
Farrington’s Mellow Yellow has now grown bigger than I ever thought it could be. Today, our Mellow Yellow range is sold in shops and used in restaurants nationwide and abroad. In fact, we now produce as many bottles in a day as I did in the whole of our first year. We have always focused on quality and are proud to produce an award winning range of products that chefs are now using in some of the best kitchens across the country!”
For more information on Farrington’s Mellow Yellow Cold Pressed Rapeseed Oil, visit their website www.farrington-oils.co.uk and find them on stand 34 at UCFF 2019, hosted at Farrington Oils.