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Brother and sister team Philip and Rebecca Rayner have developed a sustainable and profitable food manufacturing business on their arable farm in Cambridgeshire.

Since coming back to Glebe Farm at Kings Ripton, near Huntingdon, 20 years ago, the business has been transformed by entrepreneurial brother and sister duo, Rebecca and Philip Rayner.

Growing and milling pure British oats and turning these into a wide range of flour, porridge, granola, muesli and plant-based milk products, for many and varied manufacturing and retail buyers, the pair have seen the business grow from strength to strength. And that is no doubt down to their forward-thinking attitudes and combinable skills.

Originally a 204-hectare (504-acre) arable farm sited on heavy Huntingdon clay, demand has far outgrown what the home-farm can supply, and they now work with others to ensure they can deliver.

Philip says: We now draw in oats from 100 farmers averaging 40 miles from the farm but, compared with most other oat products this is still very local.

Their father, John Rayner, started as a tenant in Raunds in Northamptonshire during the 1950s.

Before that he was an agricultural test engineer working with T.C.D. Manby, head of the tractor and machine division at the National Institute of Agricultural Engineering at Wrest Park, Silsoe.

His engineering knowledge helped him and the family to cultivate tricky land at Glebe Farm to allow successful cereal production. John went on to become well known as a progressive farmer in the region.

Return

Philip also studied engineering at Cambridge before doing a PhD at Cranfield.

There followed 15 years of science and technology development and manufacturing, including work with fibre optics, robotics and lithium iron phosphate batteries, here and in America. He returned to the farm in 2008.

Rebecca did a degree in agriculture and food marketing at the University of Newcastle and a masters at Cranfield. After spending four six-month secondments through a food and fresh produce graduate scheme run by Management Development Services, Rebecca was offered a job at Lingarden Bulbs in Spalding, but she declined, returning to Glebe Farm instead.

She says: I was determined to make the farm profitable. I knew we had to add value to what we were producing on the farm. That philosophy stands as much today as it did back then.

Diversification into horse liveries and container and caravan storage ensued, while milling wheat, spelt and rye crops were grown on the farm, harvested and milled into flour and made into bread.

Rebecca sold the loaves at farmers markets and made bread mixes, which proved popular with people who were baking their own with bread machines. She enjoys going to exhibitions and has taken stands at the Norfolk and Suffolk shows, and food fairs in London and across Europe.

I was always being asked by show-goers if our products were gluten-free, which got us thinking about oats which when grown clean and handled correctly are absolutely gluten-free, says Rebecca.

Philip came home to grow the business significantly and oats came to the fore. He did a lot of research into the best way to process oats and invested in the design and build of progressively bigger oat mills. The one commissioned in 2014 tripled throughput. There has been 20 million investment in the current processing facility and we now process 10,000 tonnes of gluten-free oats a year.

The Rayners work closely with their farmer suppliers to ensure there is no risk of cross contamination with other glutinous cereals such as wheat. After the wheat, they let a stale seedbed come up and then glyphosate it, so it is really clean, and then drill the oats in the spring.

Oats are usually grown as a break crop in arable rotations to control black-grass and drilled in winter or spring. Mascani is the most widely sown winter oat and spring varieties such as Ellyann, Merlin and Lion are commonly grown. The Rayners tried Lion last year because it has good dehullability, which is important when being separated into the kernels called groats the good stuff, and the husk and chaff in the mill.

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Purity Level

Philip says: Our agronomists visit our farmer suppliers and advise them how to grow to a purity level close to Basic Seed.

The farmers flush out their combines and trailers before harvest and have dedicated oat-only stores. We haul the grain to the mill in our own lorries that only ever carry gluten-free grains, so we know there can be no cross contamination. We pay the farmers a premium for taking so much trouble.

People with health problems like coeliacs, buy our gluten-free products because they know they wont make them ill, so it is vital to make sure they are pure.

Once in the mill, every tonne of oat grains is tested to ensure there are no wheat or barley grains in 1kg of oats. We have never failed a gluten test. We spend more than 500,000 a year on testing and have a technical team of eight, so we take it very seriously indeed.

The transition to oat milk came after Rebecca was challenged by a chef visiting a food event in London in 2017. She was seeing increasing numbers of clients unable or not wishing to drink cows milk and looking for alternatives.

Philip and Rebecca went on fact finding missions to Italy and Spain where the population is 30 to 40 per cent lactose intolerant and oat milk was already a diet staple. In 2019 Philip designed and installed an oat milk facility at the farm and they have produced their PureOaty brand since 2020.

Their oat milk is sold in Morrisons, the Co-Op, Holland and Barratt and Booths, and also into the coffee and foodservice market.

Rebecca says: Coffee shop owners love our barista oat milk because it tastes really good and creates a good foam. It is a lot more sustainable than almond or soya milk which have water-usage and de-forestation issues. Glebes PureOaty is the only British-grown and made plant milk, which is true to our core.

There are a lot of independent, family coffee businesses and supplying them feels a good thing to do from our family business perspective.

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"We have many products in the pipeline and I expect there might be more building in the next 18 months"

PHILIP RAYNER

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Exported

Glebe Farm products are also exported to other countries including Italy and sold to many wholesalers and other food manufacturers in the UK. Some products are also available online through Amazon and Ocado.

The farm and food manufacturing site, which now covers 200,000 square feet, first removes the husks to produce quality groats, then porridge flakes and flour. The chaff is not wasted but used to fire three biomass boilers of 2,200 kilowatt, which are used to power the production plant.

Solar panels on the roof provide 220kW of energy and there are plans to expand capacity.

The sustainability of the whole process and the plant in particular, is very important to me, says Philip.

Our carbon footprint has been worked out at 0.29kg of CO2 lower than any other oat drink company reporting comparable figures in the UK. And we will do even better than this in future.

We try to be ethical; we send surplus to food banks in local towns and have recently sent three truckloads with 150,000 worth food to Ukraine.

Oats have been kindly given to us by eight local farmer suppliers, led by Russell Smith Farms and the Wombwell Family near Cambridge, to make porridge and we added long-life oat milk. It travels to the Ukrainian border by lorry and is taken into the country by coaches, which bring refugees out on their return.

The Rayners have progressed from a relatively small farm to a multi-million pound, vertically integrated, fully traceable, food manufacturing business with 60 employees. They are also doing their bit for the environment, with 5ha (12 acres) of Countryside Stewardship with bumblebee and pollinator mixes, margins and beetle banks.

The journey from farming to milling and to food manufacture right up to delivery of the packaged product, is a big step up, says Philip.

It requires a complete change in attitude. We are supplying customers with what they want and if there is ever a problem it will be our fault and we will fix it.

We go out of our way to ensure our oats are the purest they can be and have had some success so far. But we cannot rest our R&D team is on the constant look-out for and developing the next big thing. Oat milk is now becoming mainstream and the market more saturated. We have to keep ahead of the game and find the new niche.

We have many products in the pipeline and I expect there might be more building in the next 18 months. The growth comes organically with re-investment of profits.

Last year, in true David and Goliath style, Glebe Farm won a court case against multi-national oat drink giant Oatly, which said the name and branding of PureOaty oat milk, was too similar to its own. The judge dismissed entirely all Oatlys claims of trade mark infringement.

Philip says: It was enormously gratifying that the judge ruled in our favour, and to see that smaller independent companies can fight back and win.

Despite winning, the case still cost us a lot of money, but we were determined to defend ourselves. We are very grateful for the huge support which came from farmers, environmentalists and vegans who all signed the same petition.

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Farm facts

• 204-hectare (504-acre) arable farm, with the main focus on oats
• Oats are usually grown as a break crop in arable rotations to control black-grass and drilled in winter or spring
• Diversification started 1994
• 5ha (12 acres) of Countryside Stewardship with bumblebee and pollinator mixes, margins and beetle banks