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Yeo Valley Closes Heathfield Ice Cream Dairy

Nine years after opening its successful ice cream making business in Devon, Yeo Valley Organic, the country’s most popular organic dairy brand is closing its plant at Heathfield, near Bovey Tracey....but it isn’t leaving the County. Success is forcing it to move to much larger premises, six miles away, at Newton Abbott.

The Heathfield plant, in Old Newton Road, was acquired by the company in 1997 and since then it has produced around 25 million pots of luxury organic ice cream and frozen yogurt. Demand for the products has become so great that the only way the company can keep up with it is by moving to somewhere larger, so earlier this year it bought a recently-closed desserts factory in Newton Abbott, which will give it much greater room, as well as space for further expansion in the future. When Yeo Valley first opened at Heathfield there were only a handful of people employed there. Over the nine years since the workforce grew to around 50 and in recent months the company recruited an additional 25 people in anticipation of the move. The 50 existing employees are all transferring to the new, larger dairy and the additional members of the team have been training with the company ready for the transfer to Brunel Road Newton Abbott.

The last pots of ice cream made at Heathfield will rolled down the filling line on Thursday morning and immediately afterwards, the team working there started to dismantle the equipment there to commence the transfer to its new home.

October was chosen as the best month to start the move, as it’s a time that ice cream sales start to dip, before increasing again before Christmas. To accommodate the switch over to its new facility, Yeo Valley has built up stocks to supply anticipated demand during the month that it expects will be needed to transfer the hundreds of pieces of equipment to Newton Abbott, then install and test them, before becoming fully operational with ice cream making again in early December.

Said Charge Hand Rose Smith, who has worked at the Heathfield dairy since it opened:

“We’ve all liked being here and seeing the place get busier every year, but we’ve now reached the stage where there’s no way to increase production any further, so it will be great to move to the new dairy at Newton Abbott".

“We are all looking forward to that. We’ve already been over there to see what to expect and it’s the total opposite of what we have now....much more space, greater flexibility and enough room to help us expand for quite a few years to come.”

Yeo Valley director Graham Keating added:

“We’ve invested millions in the Newton Abbott dairy and it will be a state of the art plant that will enable us to make lots of new and exciting products. We aim to be starting to produce ice cream there by early December and we have lots of plans for further products we will be working on in the New Year.”

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