SALCOMBE DAIRY
The one thing your careers office at school doesn’t tell you, is to pick an industry that you really love. Because if you do, life is just a whole lot better than if you don’t. It’s probably just as well I guess, otherwise no one would ever end up as a lawyer.
But ice cream and chocolate? Now you’re talking.
After World War II, most ice cream served in Britain was made using powdered milk and reconstituted ingredients. Lots of vegetable fats, high air contents. A hangover of rationing – that was all that was available. And then in 1979, a Devonian genius decided to open an ice cream factory in Salcombe, making ‘proper’ ice cream. And by ‘proper’, I really do mean ‘proper’. No powdered milk, no animal fats. Just real ingredients. The result? The first modern day true premium British ice cream brand.
But not only that, they were very forward thinking. Bringing honeycomb over from New Zealand. Considered very hokey pokey at the time, but that now alongside vanilla makes up pretty much 50% of the business. OK. There’s so much to say here, bear with us.
Dan Bly and his wife Lucia run and own half of Salcombe Dairy. The other half is owned by their business partners, Nick and Ginny Boscawen of the Viscount Falmouth family, who’s family also happen to own a measurable percentage of Cornwall. Nice.
Dan, is a modern day Willy Wonka. Hearing on the grapevine through someone who knew someone who knew someone at his local village fete, Dan’s wife Lucia got wind that there may be an opportunity to get involved at the Salcombe Dairy. At the time, Dan just happened to be the Sales Director of another ice cream company. And prior to that he’d been involved in turning around Ryvita – you know the cardboard like substance that allegedly makes you thin? But really, to his bones, Dan is a sales and dairy man. And within 30 seconds of meeting him, that fact is very apparent. Getting involved at Salcombe Dairy was always going to be a match made in heaven.
[As an aside, Dan also happens to be a fully trained aerospace engineer, but on a day to day basis, that’s not a great deal of use.]
Lucia’s background is in fashion, events and design. So, they are a seriously dynamic, ice cream and chocolate loving power couple.
Rather like Thomas Wall 100 years ago, the 5th generation family butcher involved in the Walls butchery business, Dan was searching for a way to de-seasonalise the business. No offence intended here. We have a well documented love of the 99 Flake and the role it plays in British summer cultural life. But compared with the quality of product coming out of Salcombe Dairy, it’s like comparing a rust bucket Morris Minor with a state of the art modern day Range Rover. It just doesn’t get close.
Dan and Lucia’s solution as to how to de-seasonalise their business? They decided to plump for chocolate. Very wise in our view. Ice cream is very much an April to September business. And when the sun shines, business is terrific. Us Brits are very predictable – our unconditioned response to the arrival of the sun in summer is to buy an ice cream. But equally unconditioned is our response at Christmas, Valentine’s and Easter. We buy chocolate.
So, in their quest to make the business more year round, Dan and Lucia embarked on a journey to work out how to make a chocolate that was comparable in quality to the ice cream that Salcombe Dairy has been producing for the past 40 or so years. No mean feat.
Fun fact: A lot of chocolate you buy is effectively Belgian chocolate which is melted and then put into moulds. “This is absolutely not what we wanted to do” says Dan.
But a trend had been emerging. And that was Bean to Bar chocolate. Where? On the West Coast of the US (obvs) and that was what Dan and Lucia were clear they wanted to do. 100% in keeping with the original ethos of the Founders of Salcombe Dairy all those years ago. Very similar to what happened in the coffee industry from when Nescafe and Kenco ruled the world in the 1970s with instant coffee to what we now know as coffee. Does Gold Blend still exist??? What even happened to the Gold Blend couple??
With a healthy dose of chutzpa, Dan & Lucia Airbnb’d their home and took a trip to Cost Rica and Peru to find themselves some growers.
A layman’s description of premium chocolate vs the rest is as follows: Non-premium chocolate is basically known as confectionery. A large chocolate supplier needs to make such a huge volume, they need to source it from all over the world. But they also need to make an end product which consistently tastes the same.
The way they do this is by a process called conching which is where you blow off some of the acids and volatiles from the cacao and in doing that, if you over do it, you can effectively homogenise the taste. This creates consistency but the very act of doing it means you lose some of the thousands of different flavours which come from micro local cacao beans.
But when you take the powder from the pod or the bean, you can play with the flavour a bit through the process of making the chocolate. Also, by talking to suppliers about how to roast the bean, you can affect the flavour.
The end result? A Salcombe Chocolate of a quality comparable to its unrivalled Salcombe Dairy Ice Cream sibling. An absolute must to pay them a visit.
Yet another string to the bow of the entrepreneurial gold mine that is Island Street.
