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About Cornish Food

Finding Solutions

Finding

Solutions

Historically, bringing resources and skills from elsewhere to places like Cornwall – at the end of the line  – could be challenging. It’s one of the reasons Cornwall fosters entrepreneurial spirit so well, turning challenges into opportunities, cultivating new ideas and getting creative with what’s on the doorstep. It’s apparent wherever you look in the Cornish food and drink scene, where this readily adaptive mentality keeps on generating innovative concepts, such as:
  • One of Cornwall’s oldest estates, Tregothnan, established England’s first tea plantation after recognising how well flowering camellias grow in Cornwall (the tea plant is a type of camellia). Cornish tea is now sold all over the world, including in China, and the innovation continues with the recent creation of a home-designed tea-picking robot.
  • Cornwall’s largest cheesemaker at Davidstow Creamery on the north coast not only makes one of the finest cheddars, matured as much as 5 years, but now turns the whey – a by-product of the cheesemaking process – into fully traceable baby formula, creating a new income stream from what was once waste.
  • Continuing the circular economy theme, Cornwall’s only bean-to-bar craft chocolatiers, Chocolarder, have also discovered creative ways of repurposing waste. Recipes include a dark chocolate orange bar made with waste orange peel from oranges squeezed at a local bar, and boozy Christmas truffles made with spent molasses used by local distillers Loveday in their organic  rum.
  • One of Britain’s finest butchers, Philip Warren, has developed his reputation around beef from the herds that graze the moorland in this part of the country. It’s not the easy option – these animals would rarely make the grade to fetch the best prices at a regular market. However, Philip recognised the potential of the native breeds grazing on native herbage to produce beef of the finest eating quality and, proving him right, this is the beef that graces tables in some of the finest restaurants in London and Cornwall.
  • After generations making Cornish fudge in small batches to classic recipes, family confectioners Buttermilk have added a new string to their bow by launching a range of dairy-free, plant-based ‘milk’ chocolate snack bars, enabling vegans and those who follow a dairy-free diet to enjoy all the flavour of milk chocolate without the actual milk.

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Future farming

Sustainable seas

Working together

Evolving tradition