From Field to Fork

3rd March 2010, 12:13pm

With a wheelbarrow, a borrowed tractor and a beaten-up Citroën, farmers-son Guy Watson, began delivering vegetables to a handful of Devonshire locals in 1987. Now, with a turnover of £33 million, Guy’s vegetable box business and award-winning Field Kitchen restaurant have made him one of the UK’s leading organic food pioneers. Jennifer Gaskin travelled to meet him…

Upon graduating from Oxford with a 1st degree in Agricultural Studies, Guy Watson, fell into a job as a management consultant. Unhappy with office life and harbouring a secret desire to be his own boss, he often found his mind wandering out of the city and back to the Devonshire farm on which he grew up. "When I realised that I wanted to return to farming, I spoke to some of the growers in the local area and saw that they were using the sort of organic practices I'd always been passionate about and making a reasonable profit. So, I loaned three acres of land from the family farm and got started."

Returning to Devon in 1985, Watson began growing vegetables organically and then later, delivering them to the local community. Within a year he had around 200 customers and after three, Watson was personally doing the rounds to over 800 homes. In 2001, he took the brave step to expand the business by franchising deliveries to specific areas, a move which saw profits grow 80% year-on-year for the next three years. Seeing that his customers were excited about eating food that had a connection to their local area, Watson decided to expand his business further by opening the Field Kitchen restaurant in 2005.

Loosely inspired by Alice Waters' legendary Chez Panisse in California, the concept for the Field Kitchen is, simply cooked, organic food, made from the best possible, seasonal ingredients. Watson brought Jane Baxter on board as head chef and, after a £200,000 project to convert an old barn into the restaurant building; the 64-capacity restaurant opened its doors to a mixture of vegetable box customers, tourists and curious locals.

Baxter earned her stripes at Joyce Molyneux's Carved Angel and at the River Café. She then spent seven years cooking her way around the South Pacific before returning to Devon to take the helm at the Field Kitchen.

The fact that the restaurant was to be located on the Riverford Farm site proved to be a stumbling block with the local authorities and planning permission was only granted on the condition that diners take a tour of the farm before eating. But, for Watson, this only enhanced the restaurant's concept. "The whole idea for the restaurant was to give people more of a connection with their food. So, when visitors sit down to eat and see the vegetables that they have just been walking amongst, they get really excited and that's the most important thing."

The farm tour includes a gentle ramble across some of the fields where visitors are shown a selection of the vegetables grown on the 1,000 acre site. Part of the experience is jumping aboard a tractor trailer for a bumpy tour of the poly-tunnels – a treat that is particularly enjoyed by younger visitors.

Back at the restaurant, groups of eight diners sit around picnic-style tables, where they may or may not know their neighbours – but this is all part of the experience. "Because of the rules that went along with the planning permission, we had to work out a way of serving people. So, we came up with the 'family sharing' idea where everybody sits down at the same time, all the food comes out at once and everybody helps themselves," says Baxter.

Its location in the heart of Devon's tourism Mecca means that trade at the Field Kitchen is extremely seasonal. During the summer and for the month of December the restaurant is usually fully booked for lunch and employs around 25 staff members. "We're also starting to attract more people for dinner and this year we're hoping to open five nights a week during our busiest periods," says Baxter. Lunch at the family-friendly restaurant is a set two-course menu; the main course is made up of five hearty vegetable dishes and one meat dish.

"The vegetables are the stars of the show," says Watson. "We often have customers who say they don't like beetroot, for instance, but they find that they really like the way Jane's cooked it, and so they go away and try it for themselves which is what we want to encourage." Some of Baxter's imaginative vegetable dishes include; purple sprouting broccoli with chilli, garlic and pine nuts, smoked butternut squash with sage and cream and carrot, beetroot and celeriac with orange and caraway.

Riverford doesn't have any livestock on site and so the meat for the Field Kitchen comes either from Watson's brother Ben's neighbouring farm, or from specialist suppliers in the local area. One of Watson's aims was to make food at the Field Kitchen affordable and lunch costs a reasonable £17.50 for adults and £8.75 for children. This price point means that it's quality rather than quantity where the meat dish is concerned. "It doesn't cost a lot to eat here and so to get our margins right, we're slightly restricted with how much meat we can serve," explains Baxter. "We use organic beef, lamb, chicken or pork and the meat is always accompanied by a potato dish or some root vegetables." After the main course, a choice of eight or nine traditional British deserts are lined up on the restaurant counter to choose from, with the sticky toffee pudding a firm favourite amongst regular visitors.

Whilst the Field Kitchen can boast that 90% of their vegetables come either directly from Riverford or from within their cooperative of sister farms, some of their dry goods, such as coffee, must inevitably come from overseas. However, the Field Kitchen has a no air freight policy so, to save carbon emissions, out-sourced goods are shipped instead. The Field Kitchen's Floresta organic coffee is grown biodynamically by a cooperative in northeast Brazil and Watson buys it directly from the growers. This agreement means that the producers are paid at least 40% more than the Fairtrade price for the fresh green beans, plus an extra 40% of the profits on the sale of the roasted coffee.

And, this isn't the restaurant's only link with the developing world. In fact, Watson has been working with small scale farmers in Uganda for over 10 years. In 1998, some of these farmers travelled to Riverford to learn how to turn their own farms organic and Watson also helped to raise enough money for one of the farmers to set up a training institute in Uganda to teach other growers about organic farming.

At £300,000, the Field Kitchen's turnover is around 1% of the Riverford empire and although profits slowed for the business last year and this year's extreme weather has upset growing patterns, Watson remains ambitious about spreading the word on organic food. "Because the majority of the food for the Field Kitchen is grown on the farm, we can't plan too far in advance as depending on conditions, crops might be ready early, late or even not at all. But the key to running a business like this is adapting the menu to suit the produce you have and remaining flexible." This summer, Watson is launching a marketing initiative which will see a traditional yurt, with an onboard chef, embark on a tour of the UK, taking the Field Kitchen's recipes to the masses. So, it seems it's only onwards and upwards for the organic food revolution.

Words - Jennifer Gaskin