Biscuit company goes from market stall to international success

Farmhouse Biscuits’ workforce, numbering 300 at peak times, produces more than 60 tons of biscuits every week from its bakery in Nelson.

Many are destined for the 40 countries it exports to, including Japan, Australia and the US. Others are heading for its UK clients, who include the Royal gift shops and the most prestigious stores in London.

The company has 1,500 recipes to its name and a turnover in the region of £14m. But if it hadn’t been for the hard, bleak winter of 1962 it wouldn’t exist at all.

The family business was created out of necessity. Philip McIvor and his wife Dorothy were farming 140-acres in the hillsides near Clitheroe and were waking up each morning to find another dozen of their poultry frozen to death.

Snowed in for weeks, the farm was in trouble and in desperation the couple took a stall on Blackburn market to sell what poultry and eggs they had.

However, the stall looked so bare that Dorothy made a few biscuits in the farmhouse kitchen to sell. They were an immediate hit with shoppers and out of that the business was born.

Dorothy rolled the products out by hand, creating them using recipes passed down by the family and others cut out of women’s magazines. Philip baked them.

Looking back at those times he said: “The market stall was just a matter of survival, of keeping going and keeping warm. It was a terrible winter. We were in the red in the bank, they were very good to us; we started with just £600.”

While four generations of the McIvor family have been involved in the operation, current chief executive Gill McIvor is the second generation to run the business commercially. Philip remains chairman and still attends, albeit on a part time basis now he is in his 83rd year.

Long-service is in the company’s DNA. Commercial director Tony Birbeck has been with the business for 28 years; while financial director Philip Acheson-Gray started work there aged 21 and has more than 30 years’ service.

Farmhouse Biscuits is now one of the UK’s biggest independent premier biscuit manufacturers, producing a wide range of bespoke biscuits including gift packs, gluten and sugar-free, Free From and Kosher products.

Many of its orders come by word of mouth and through two trade shows that it attends every year in the UK and Germany.

Its customer base ranges from large retail clients to those upmarket London department stores.

Gill McIvor is looking towards future growth and developing more products from its 200,000 sq ft converted mill premises.

She says: “The business has grown enormously but we remain faithful to our traditional methods of baking and continue to hand down our combined wealth of experience from generation to generation.”