St Nicholas Court Farms has always been ahead of its time. An advocate of local sourcing since its inception back in 1959, the company has remained true to its roots through times when submitting to centralised distribution would have been simpler.
Its Local Heroes marketing campaign, with photographs of growers featured in the media and on buses in Kent last year, cemented the company’s local pledge to consumers and gave these producers virtual celebrity status in the county. Furthermore, the forward-thinking company’s school programme is now in its 11th year and St Nicholas’ packhouse is now welcoming recruits from within Thanet that were involved in the first years of the initiative, which sees schoolchildren planting and harvesting their own potatoes on the 800-hectare farm under a grower’s supervision and guidance.
Indeed, the local community is very much the central focus of the company; along with its 17-strong local grower group, it produces potatoes that are both packed and sold in Kent - with no need for a centralised hub. And the firm is very much a family affair. Brothers Martin and Dick Tapp - now chairman - took the business on from their father Arthur Griffin Tapp, who bought St Nicholas’ farm site in 1932 after returning from World War I. In 1959, Dick decided to take the firm in the packing direction - despite whispers that it would never work - and has now been joined by his daughter, QC system co-ordinator Alex Pace, as well as his niece, sales and marketing director Ros Tapp and nephew, managing director Jonathan Tapp. The family atmosphere runs throughout the farms and the packhouse, as many husbands work in the fields while their wives pack, and brothers and sisters from the village work side by side.
Being a grower first and foremost and keeping the needs of the producer group at heart are some of the reasons why Dick believes that St Nicholas has flourished through difficult times. “I started off as a grower and I still am a grower, so I think that level of understanding makes a difference,” he explains. “We stood firm on our principles.”
Dick joined his father in the company from the outset, fresh from university, and soon brought his revolutionary ideas about packing potatoes to the farm. “We put together a small wooden shed with hand-made equipment from bits of a harvester and such in a different format. At that time, there was no water source to the building, so we were just brushing the potatoes and not earning very much from it at all.
“At that point, packed product didn’t have a big market and secondary wholesalers were not taking it on. But they started supplying The Co-operative in the early 1960s and suddenly there was a real need for pre-packed goods. There were hardly any fresh produce packers around in Kent at the time, but it soon caught on.”
When Dick’s father took on the farm, dairy cattle came with it in addition to the potato fields and it was St Nicholas’ main activity. But the dairy business did not survive the 1960s and the dairy buildings were soon converted to potato packhouses. New machinery was bought in and two more 1,000-tonne stores were built.
“When we first started to pack potatoes, we used to pack no more than 5-10t a day and emptied sacks by hand,” says Dick. “But through the 1970s, we moved to more complex machinery. We were the first people to use the vertical form-fill seal machine and innovation has worked well for us. By 1975, we had to use this machine through the customer’s request.”
By the early 1970s, demand for packed potatoes outweighed the volume that St Nicholas could grow, so it had to start sourcing from outside of the farm. This was not as easy as you might think and Kentish growers needed some persuading. “There was a resistance to washing [potatoes] from growers,” Dick explains. “They were accustomed to grading their own potatoes for market and we wanted them straight from the field and in bulk. In the end, it saved time for the grower and meant that we could control the quality, so it happened eventually.”
The firm has gone through a number of customers over the years and faced the challenges brought by the ever-changing sphere of retail. And in the 1980s, Safeway became its biggest customer and would bring the business’ greatest challenge to date.
“Safeway came to us and asked us to pack for them - which was quite unusual in those days,” says Dick. “Then a Safeway buyer suggested that we needed a new purpose-built packhouse, so it was built in 1989. At our peak in around 1995, we were packing 40,000t of potatoes for Kent a year, for Safeway, as well as smaller volumes for Somerfield and Tesco. We were flat out.”
But when Morrisons - known for packing its own produce - bought out Safeway in 2004, St Nicholas was faced with a tough choice to make. “When Safeway was taken over, Morrisons did not need us to continue the contract and it left us with hardly any work,” explains Jonathan. “It drastically reduced the work we did for supermarkets, which was our mainstay and we had to make a decision as to whether to carry on and slim down, or stop entirely.”
“It didn’t feel right not to try,” Dick intercepts. “About that time, Tesco took on a new local focus and now St Nicholas’ potatoes go to mainly Kent, as well as West Sussex and London.”
The company now packs mainly Maris Piper, white potatoes and Riviera, as well as its favourite, Desiree, mainly for Tesco. Tesco and St Nicholas have now been trading together for more than 20 years. Quentin Sandell, local buying manager for Tesco in Kent, says: “As a supplier, St Nicholas Court Farms strongly supports our local sourcing policy, supplying us with seven varieties of Kent potatoes to our Kent stores. This local produce is popular with our customers and has a strong following across Kent. The company is passionate about its product and works proactively within the local community in taking the local message forward.”
St Nicholas has a long and fruitful alliance with potato co-operative Kent Veg Ltd and most of its members supply the packer with their product. Chairman of the co-operative, Anthony Curwen, is also the estate manager for grower The Quex Park Estates Co Ltd and believes that St Nicholas has gone above and beyond the call of duty as a packer.
“Kent Veg’s relationship with St Nicholas is imperative as our growers need a reliable market for their potatoes,” says Curwen. “It is important that it is a separate entity and that we mutually benefit each other. We are all part of the local community and that is why it works. Rapport and trust have been built up, which gives growers the confidence to go forward, increase their yields, work on new product development and so on.”
St Nicholas’ technical team is also at its growers’ disposal to help them grow in the most efficient way possible. Technical manager Graeme Skinner goes to members’ farms to advise on all aspects of potato production.
“Graeme makes sure that the seeds are top notch and ever since my farm has been associated with St Nicholas, the quality of the potatoes grown has been so much better,” says Curwen. “We meet Graeme on a regular basis so it is not like dealing with a seed merchant.”
This year, St Nicholas’ schoolchildren project is going back in time and pupils at a local school are growing potatoes in old car tires, as Londoners were once encouraged to do in World War II when British food and growing space was scarce. “Usually, the schoolchildren are taken to a field to meet the grower and produce their own potatoes to present at the Kent County Show in July,” explains Ros. “It involves the community and makes consumers in general more interested in the process we go through here and increases understanding of the benefits of producing food locally.”
More than ever, St Nicholas is keen to push forward Kent local branding and the company’s ‘Kentpac’ was the first local brand on the market some 50 years ago. Some 95 per cent of the potatoes packed at its site are still sourced within five miles. “We have been prioritising issues like food miles and localness for a long time,” says Eddie Knowles, sales and marketing manager, who has been with the company for more than 25 years. “But category management happened and we had to go the way of the industry to some extent. But our major customer, Tesco, has proven that local produce sits well alongside the generic offer.
“Tesco is really keen on local produce and this fits in with us, as local sourcing and distribution is what we are all about. Consumers believe in local and the buying trend is very strong. They want to buy local and support the farming industry. We have had customers come to us and tell us how pleased they are that they can get our potatoes in their local Tesco. Our St Nicholas logo is on all of our packs of potatoes at Tesco and that is something that really makes a difference.”
As St Nicholas celebrates its 50th anniversary, it is looking forward to further promoting the company as a local producer and packer. “We need to take this on one more step,” says Knowles. “And we are finding out how best to do that at the moment. For us, to get into the store as a grower makes this business a reality for consumers and it is healthy for the grower to have that interaction as well. We also need to talk to staff in store and make them aware of how local our offer is. It is easier for us, as local has been our aim since the start and we have been lucky to have had buyers who have had faith in us.
“But the secret to our success is the growers and the staff; it is not the building or the machinery that has made the business; it is team work,” he adds.
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