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Next year , Belvoir Farm ( Belvoir ) will celebrate 40 years of operations , and what a time it has been . The company was officially established in 1984 by John Manners , the current owner and managing director , Peverel Manners ’ father , on the site of a fruit farm that his parents had originally founded some time earlier . From its days as a humble fruit farm , Belvoir grew into the celebrated drinks business that it ’ s known as today , based on its flagship flavor – elderflower .
Travelling back many years , the organization ’ s plot in The Vale of Belvoir was home to some 80 acres of elderflower plantations . This has consequently had a huge influence on the company ’ s long-standing relationship with the iconic ingredient , which back in earlier times was processed entirely by hand to produce cordials and beverages to be delivered to local farm shops and villages .
Commercialization can often be the fork in the road for small businesses , at which they stand to lose their founding culture and principles , but this is not the case with Belvoir by any means , which has steadily grown over the last four decades with unadulterated grace .
“ Throughout its journey ,” opens Frank Fitzgibbons , Production Director , “ Belvoir has successfully maintained its cottage-industry essence . Until the millennium , we were really just generating minor sales off the back of the elderflower cordial , before Peverel obtained a few key retail customers in the early noughties , which prompted him to start thinking bigger .
“ We began expanding our offerings and targeting them beyond our traditional clientele in the single-serve market space . By the time I joined in 2003 , we were picking up some serious pace , and by the end of the decade we had grown from a £ 2 million venture into a £ 14 million enterprise . Around 2008 we invested heavily in our capacity , in the form of a new
bottling line , which was key to facilitating our future growth . However , what really drove us to building our first purpose-built facility in 2015 , was the significant leap we saw in the brand ’ s popularity .”
Weathering the storm
Today , Belvoir ’ s capacity sits at around 26 million bottles per year , between its two stateof-the-art bottling lines and a new canning line , which are fully automated and operated by a shift pattern of employees . With further
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