Fruit flavours double sales for Clandeboye Estate Yoghurt

Clandeboye Estate Yoghurt, Northern Ireland's only yoghurt producer, has almost doubled turnover by investing in market-led new product development that led to the launch of a range of fruit flavours for customers in Great Britain and the Republic of Ireland.

The company, a successful farm diversification project in Bangor, County Down, launched a range of stirred yoghurts in raspberry, strawberry and toffee and caramel flavours - last year and has seen business grow strongly particularly in the Republic of Ireland.

The company is also now supplying natural yoghurt to a leading wholesaler in Britain.

Bryan Boggs, Clandeboye Estate's general manager, said: "We started the business in 2007 essentially with two products - a natural handcrafted and a Greek style yoghurt - that were made from milk from the historic estate's herd of Holstein and Jersey cows.

"We saw an opportunity for an artisan yoghurt produced in Northern Ireland. While this enabled us to gain a market foothold in major supermarkets, we soon realised that we needed to attract more convenience stores to enable us to grow the business. This meant developing stirred yoghurt in a range of tasty flavours.

"Creating new products is usually an expensive business, an activity that's especially difficult for a small artisan business. We've just three people on the payroll producing yoghurts by hand. We had to expand our range to grow sales.

"All our yoghurt is made by hand in our small artisan dairy, we add no milk powder, cream or other thickening agents thus ensuring a true 100 per cent natural taste and using other natural and locally sourced ingredients.

"In addition to natural and Greek yoghurts, we now offer for major retailers including Sainsbury and Tesco a range of fruit flavours. Over the past year our turnover has almost doubled from the introduction of the new stirred yoghurts," he added.

The company, based on one of the largest privately owned estates in Ireland, home of Lady Dufferin, The Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava, has a contract with one of Ireland's leading chilled and frozen food sales and distribution companies, PRM Group, for the Republic of Ireland.