Daffodil Foods the creator of award winning dairy products proves again that great opportunities hide just around the corner.
This was certainly the case for Jade Simpson, a second-year student at Cardiff Metropolitan University who landed a year-long placement at Daffodil Foods, a North Wales based yogurt and cream supplier, with head office in Botwnnog, just 5 miles down the road from her family home.
Daffodil Foods, which is based on Pen Llŷn, supplies a range of premium yogurts and desserts to various customers in Wales and UK, including national retailers, NHS and many independent distributors. Lynne Rowlands, Director of the business, explains:
“We deal with national retailers on daily basis and work with them to bring various new dairy products into the market. This means that at times we have to try 20 versions of one recipe before we find the ‘one’. This is where Jade came in with her background in Food Science and Technology having done two years of her degree at Cardiff Met.”
Jade was looking for a relevant work placement as a part of her university course but wanted to stay local on the Llŷn Peninsula at the same time. Just as she thought this wasn’t going to be easy, her mum brought home a pot of Daffodil Foods Yogurt and to their surprise, it turned out that Daffodil Foods was based 5 miles down the road, in Botwnnog. That was where Jade went to the local school for several years.
“It was a pleasant surprise when I got the reply from Daffodil Foods asking me to come in for a job interview. I really wanted to spend my year working in food industry and in a business that would give me the experience that was relevant to my course. I have spent these past months developing product recipes from scratch and some of the products I have worked on with Daffodil team have now been launched in one of the major retailers under their own brand and are sold in hundreds of stores around UK.” said Jade.
Lynne has once completed a very similar degree in Food Science herself and felt she wanted to give this opportunity to someone local to enable them to go onto having a rewarding career in the food industry one day.
“It’s time to give back and share my experience now and I am pleased to see that there are talented and hard working young people out there. Where we are based, it is not always easy to grab hold off good opportunities, so I am very pleased our business was in a position to support someone who grew up locally but wanted to gain the knowledge of the food industry without having to relocate. During her time here, Jade had not only cooked hundreds of new product samples, but she also spent hours on completing the paperwork for the product specifications, helped us get through a technical audit and travelled quite a few miles to visit some major retailers with us. She has been a very busy bee🐝 this past year.”
Daffodil Foods has seen a double-digit growth for the last 3 years and has recently made a significant investment into a new dairy desserts production line in a bid to fuel that growth further.
Feature image: Jade Simpson being interviewed by Alun Rhys from BBC Radio Cymru
About Daffodil Foods
After a 20-year career in the dairy sector, working for the likes of Dairy Crest and Milk Link (now Arla), Lynne Rowlands gambled her accumulated expertise on her new kitchen-top venture. She designed a series of dairy products using Argos-bought yogurt culture flasks. But when banks refused to lend start-up capital, Lynne sought a suitable partner and found the ideal match in Tomlinson’s Dairies, run by brothers Philip and John.
“It was like going into the Dragon’s Den,” said Lynne.
Fast forward to today, Botwnnog based Daffodil Foods also supplies the retailers with their own label products such as pannacotta sold into 300 Morrison’s stores under Morrison’s own brand and Ocado yogurts. Lynne also designed a bespoke yogurt for NHS and schools.
“I was amazed to read a figure that 40% of patients in Welsh hospitals are under-nourished,” said Lynne. “So we created a line of yogurts with different nutritional goals: larger pots for the under-nourished, low fat pots for the obese, and snack pots for those on the go.”
