Core business (From Wilts and Gloucestershire Standard)

Core business

Sophie Bradshaw visits the apple pressing plant where business is blossoming.

Arriving at Bensons Apple Juice's factory at Stones Farm in Sherborne on a hot Friday morning, it would be easy to think you have come to the wrong place.

Instead of a noisy, buzzing factory churning out the litres of pure fruit juice that traverse the country each day, what you find is birds twittering, a set of sleepy Cotswold farm buildings and Jeremy Benson, striding across the farmyard with a couple of Jack Russells in tow.

"Friday is cleaning day," explains Jeremy, the young owner of this well-known Cotswold success story.

"You'll have to imagine it all happening," And imagine I can - very easily. The Bensons 'factory' is nothing more than a large barn with basic machinery, tubes, apple crushers and a bottling conveyor belt, and the 'office' is in the old grain store above.

"The grain chute is still a hole in the floor somewhere," laughs Jeremy, "but we do have Broadband up here."

Four years ago, Jeremy Benson worked on a farm in East Anglia. "There were only three of us," Jeremy remembers," and it was 7 days a week, 15 hours a day. I loved it, but it was hard work, and in the end I basically decided to get a life.

I realised that in the apple industry about 70 per cent of apples were left on the tree, and although there's nothing wrong with them. The supermarkets won't take them because they are the wrong size or shape."

Moving back to his native Gloucestershire, Jeremy bought an apple press from a man in Evesham and started making apple juice by hand to sell at farmers' markets.

Four years later, Bensons Apple Juice makes 7,500 bottles of juice a day, compared with just 200 back in 2001. As well as supplying many shops and cafes around the Cotswolds, Bensons sell at 35 farmers' markets and shops within a 100-mile radius.

They also supply the Tate and Tate Modern galleries in London and half the National Trust tearooms in the country.

But despite selling their wares as far afield as Scotland and London, the local side of things is important to all seven full-time staff at Stones Farm.

"We get our Coxes apples from Broadway for half the year," says Jeremy, "and Jonagold apples from East Sussex for the rest of the time. We could use Coxes all year round, but they don't store well from March onwards, and we wouldn't be making the quality apple juice we want to.

We could also get Coxes from abroad too, but that's not what we're about." As well as the apples, all other ingredients in Bensons' nine other flavours (except, perhaps understandably, mangoes) are grown in Britain.

Making a product that fits in well with their surroundings is also important to the staff at Bensons. There is very little wastage from the juice factory, as all the apple pulp left over from the pressed apples is fed to pigs at farms in the village.

And keeping it in the family is a priority too. With Jeremy's wife Alexia doing the books, Mum taking part in finance and deliveries and Dad running the factory on a practical level, there isn't much the Bensons don't do themselves.

And this is exactly what is important to Jeremy. "It's a real team here," he says. "Having worked for a big company before, I don't feel comfortable with hierarchy. I muck in all the time - I even clean the loo!"

So despite Stones Farm being possibly the quietest factory in the country, there is much going on in this tiny corner of Gloucestershire. And with all the family involved in the apple juice making process, it's no wonder the country loves everything Bensons.

Bensons Apple Juice is available at good food stores throughout the Cotswolds, and is available in Apple and Cinnamon, Apple and Cherry, Apple and Mango, Apple and Raspberry, Apple and Cranberry, Apple and Elderflower, Apple and Rhubarb and new Apple and Blackberry flavours.

www.bensonsapplejuice.co.uk