The key to this level of growth was moving from hand-making the cordial to using more and more advanced machinery. ‘Our first ever bottling machine was simply a little jug,’ laughs Pev. ‘Then we used a little machine which you could fill with twenty litres of cordial. You’d put four bottles in a rack, push them up to activate the filling nozzles, cap them using a foot operated machine, and then take them to another machine which would roll a label on. It really was very bad.’ Nowadays everything at Belvoir Farm is done automatically end-to-end, from the bottles coming off the pallets to the labelling at the end, and the factory produces up to 10,000 bottles an hour. ‘We’ve grown the business organically just by trying to make more bottles every year – it’s very unfashionable. As we sold more, we bought more kit and gradually built a factory.’
This growth would have been short-lived if the cordial had lost its quality or taste as production scaled up, something Pev was careful to retain as more and more bottles were filled. Still made from carefully selected, all-natural ingredients, Belvoir Farm actively avoids using any form of artificial flavourings, instead preferring the use of actual fruit juice combined with a small amount of citric acid. What’s more, apart from some initial tweaks to the original recipe back in 1984, the elderflower cordial hasn’t changed at all over the years. ‘We stuck to the original recipe because people love it and we always thought, if someone loves what you do, you should just stick with it,’ says Pev. ‘People told me that we could make it with less flowers and I knew we could, but I didn’t want to because fewer flowers would mean we’d lose that last two percent of taste.’
Of course, the elderflowers are the reason behind the cordial’s flavour and while there is little variety in terms of the taste of different flower varieties, the biggest difficulty faced by Belvoir Farm is getting enough of them. Originally Pev and the team would do all the picking themselves but as demand grew they started to get the locals to help out. ‘We have what we call ‘the big harvest’, which is where we advertise locally for the good people of Leicestershire, Lincolnshire, Cambridgeshire and the other surrounding counties to bring us flowers and we pay them by the kilo. This year we got almost thirty tonnes of flowers from them.’