The Boxford Group is a family-run company, established in 1938 by Bernard Loshak and Devora Peake and further expanded by Bill and Devora Peake from 1948 onwards. The farming operation now covers around 900 acres of the Suffolk countryside, primarily producing top fruit.
In the 1960s, the fruit-growing side of the business funded its diversification into Copella Farm-Pressed Apple Juice, which has become a widely successful fruit juice brand, and a golf course business that now incorporates two 18-hole championship courses, a hotel complex and some of the best leisure facilities in the region.
Copella has been sold not once, but twice, by the family, and is now in the hands of PepsiCo-owned Tropicana. But Stoke by Nayland Hotel, Golf Club and Spa has 2,200 golf and leisure members, 30 sought-after bedrooms which accommodate visitors for the popular Golf and Spa Breaks, a high quality restaurant and an international reputation fostered through regular guests such as Premiership football teams and International golf professionals on the PGA Europro tour, who participate in the worldwide televised annual Stoke by Nayland International Open.
It is fair to say that, in recent years, the leisure side of the business, started when Bill and Devora Peake decided to convert 300 acres of arable farming land in the early 1970s into first the Gainsborough course (1972) and then the Constable (finished in 1979), has become the cornerstone of the Boxford Group. While fruit production bankrolled the initial diversification, the reverse is now true.
The business has its separate focuses, but is run as one entity. The horticultural section of the Boxford Group of companies now comprises Boxford (Suffolk) Farms Ltd and Plantsman Ardleigh Storage Ltd.
The businesses within The Boxford Group are run by four of Devora Peake’s five children. Susanna Rendall is managing director, and Jonathan Loshak, Tamara Unwin and Carmella Meyer are directors. The third generation has also now begun to join the fold, with Susanna Rendall’s son Robert becoming md of Plantsman Ardleigh Storage, and her daughter Octavia working at Peake Fitness and Spa, the leisure facility within the hotel. Tamara’s daughter, Jess, is also working at the Hotel for part of her gap year before university.
The Peake empire though, owes its existence to apples. For 65 years, top fruit has been grown extensively. Cox is the mainstay, but it sits amongst 27 different varieties in the company’s orchards, some of which are 60 years old. The oldest remaining trees in fact provide a tranquil and picturesque visage to the bustling Copella production site and were planted 60 years ago by prisoners of war. There is still around 80 hectares of bush area cultivating traditional varieties, largely a result of the juicing business on its doorstep, but also because parts of the orchard are signed up to the Countryside Stewardship Scheme. The trees are also producing decent yields of marketable fresh fruit.
Boxford is far from being stuck in its past though. A five-year business plan hatched in 2001 saw the company commit to planting 10 acres of new trees each year, with a view to rejuvenating its orchards and gradually phasing out its older trees. When troubleshooter Sir John Harvey Jones recorded the third of a series of TV programmes on the company, in 1999, he advised the family to pull out a third of its orchards immediately. They listened, but they didn’t follow that advice, preferring a pragmatic approach to grubbing that means the company can afford to wait for its new trees to reach full production before pulling out the creaking but reliable older orchards.
“It got to the point after the 2001 season, where it was becoming hard to see a future in fruit production,” says Rob Rendall. “We decided that if we were going to be in farming, we were really going to be in it and invest in developing the business.”
The plan included a “sustainable investment programme” for both top fruit and soft fruit. The latest instalment, in January 2005, saw a new intensive orchard planted with four hectares of Braeburn, NAKB on M9 rootstock and Lochbuie on Pagen 2 rootstock, using Gala and Ida Red as pollinators. There are three metres between rows and 80cm between each of the 4,100 trees per hectare. Once the costs of irrigation, posts, wire and hail netting are factored in, Boxford will have invested around £25,000/ha.
“Despite poor returns for top fruit in recent years, we have been fortunate to fund this reinvestment into top fruit from our other businesses,” says Carmella Meyer. “We feel the only way forward is to increase yields, cut growing costs and provide customers with the varieties and quality they want.
“Unfortunately, the retailers are forcing the prices down each year and the only way to survive and grow is to reduce our acreage whilst increasing our returns per hectare.”
Farms manager Andrew Cranston says the Braeburn orchard represents a change of direction to address that need: “In the past we’ve been buying a tree to grow it in a space. Now we have identified the specific space for this variety.” The approach is not new, of course, but it is unusual in the UK, as Cranston has spaced the trees and will use wires in an attempt to ensure that each apple gets the same amount of light and the crop can be as uniform as possible.
Whereas traditional methods have left producers waiting five years for their first commercial crop of fruit from new trees, this Braeburn orchard is expected to provide half a crop next year and a full commercial crop in 2007. “It is all about getting the orchard into full commercial production as quickly as you can and getting as many bins per hectare as you can,” says Cranston. He expects to harvest 60 tonnes a hectare from the new orchards, while the adjoining 50-year old Cox orchard yields just 20t/ha. The Braeburn output should be 90 per cent Class I too. Next year will see 1ha of Cox and 3ha of Gala planted using similar techniques, before more Braeburn goes in, in 2007.
Meyer adds that Boxford is also “fortunate” to have several outlets for its fruit, including marketing desk OrchardWorld, Morrisons, the National School Fruit & Vegetable Scheme (NSFVS) and Copella.
As well as outlets, the company also has inlets, through its own packing and storage facility. Boxford Farms initially packed its own fruit, before purchasing a packing operation from Ace Fruit, near Chelmsford. When Plantsman Ardleigh, one of the last remaining fruit packhouses in East Anglia, became available for purchase in 1995, its proximity to the main Boxford centre, plus the fact that there are a number of soft-fruit growers in its vicinity made it an obvious target.
Plantsman Ardleigh has more than 2,000t of CA storage capacity for top fruit and chilled facilities for soft fruit, and has been storing and packing apples for OrchardWorld and others for over five years and has seen volumes double in the current year due to the additional business picked up by OrchardWorld in the restructure of Sainsbury’s top-fruit category. The geographical location, just 30 minutes from Felixstowe, and 10 minutes from its head office, is ideal for OrchardWorld, as one of its triumvirate of contract packing houses in the south east.
“If you’re a grower, you really have to take what’s given to you, but if you’re a packer too and vertically integrated, you have more control,” says Meyer. “There has been a big increase in throughput this year, but we like to take the attitude that anything is possible - you need to be highly flexible in fresh produce.
“Plantsman’s soft-fruit business enabled us to extend the use of the packhouse and labour through the year and it was at the time a selling desk in its own right. We ran it that way for nine years before joining KG in 2004,” says Meyer.
The Plantsman business is also being upgraded through investment. Each CA store is being renovated in turn and SmartFresh is being used for the first time this year to boost pre-Christmas shelf-life performance for English fruit. The investments being made in the orchards, and the increase in imported fruit passing through the stores, will undoubtedly necessitate further expansion.
Boxford has also been proactive in becoming involved in the NSFVS, and supplies top fruit to London and parts of eastern England through Peachey’s. “We have more smaller apples than most due to our type of orchards,” says Meyer, “and the scheme is extremely important to us.”
She adds that it is largely a predictable ride. “There are no unknowns, such as promotions, packaging changes, and you know your prices from the beginning of the season. I think it has generally been very successful - the teachers I have spoken to have said how surprised they are at the impact it has had. Children are also being presented with some of the more unusual varieties of English fruit, which parents shopping in the UK’s supermarkets might find tough to find. “We’d love them to be going into supermarkets in a few years and saying ‘where are the Laxton’s?” says Meyer.
That may happen, but the old English types are unlikely to return in force. “There is still a niche there for traditionals,” she says, “and we can make money out of them. The question we will have to answer is whether we replant some of the better performing traditional varieties or continue to rely on the bush fruit we already have.”
THE INIMITABLE DEVORA PEAKE
Devora Peake is one of the more remarkable figures to have worked in the English fresh produce arena. Born near Tel Aviv in 1915, she arrived in the Suffolk countryside with first husband Bernard Loshak in 1938.
Renowned for her forthright manner, inimitable sense of humour and powers of persuasion, Devora was known personally or by name by most people involved in British agriculture in the second half of the 20th century. She and second husband Bill Peake were fruit growers, farmers and pioneers of great vision, best illustrated by the article on these pages. The Peakes were recognised as ahead of their time in recognising the health properties of organic production and in advancing the diversity of farming practices and adding value to fresh produce.
They ran the largest vegetarian restaurant in London for some years, but their main claim to fame was to produce an apple juice of which sales were made and developed on taste and quality rather than through the normal route of advertising.
The name of Devora Peake therefore became synonymous with the fruit juice brand Copella and after her death in 1999, her legacy was the multifaceted and diverse family businesses being run by four of her five children and some of her 12 grandchildren. Copella itself is a name derived from the initial letters of the main variety of choice Cox’s Orange Pippin, and the second half of the name of the Peakes’ youngest daughter, Carmella.
Always ready and willing to comment on what she saw as unfair competition from her European counterparts, Devora Peake was a stalwart and founder member of the Women’s Farming Union. Her campaigning, production and marketing efforts were recognised in 1983 when she won the Joseph Nickerson Award for Added Value and again in 1984, as the winner of the National Farmers’ Union Marketing Award.
She was also awarded an MBE in recognition of her work and made a Fellow of the Royal Agricultural Society.
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