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News from the farm...

Every month we write a newsletter which we send to our regular dairy customers, as well as subscribers to our mailing list. To receive the newsletter in your inbox, please click here.

Pricing Changes at North Aston Dairy

Firstly, a huge thank you to everyone who completed our anonymous survey sent out with the last newsletter. We have been reading through the answers with great interest over the last two weeks and have been really touched by the honest feedback. Please keep them coming in - we will continue reading all responses as we shape our plans for the future. We’ve decided to increase the prize draw prize to a year’s free supply of our organic ice cream (limited to 25 jars), and the lucky winner will be announced in the New Year.

As we mentioned in the newsletter, we’ve been taking a very close look at how much it costs us to produce, process and deliver our milk and other products to your doorsteps every week. We very much enjoy supplying you all with our delicious, nutritious dairy produce, in a way that is good for the planet and convenient and affordable for everyone, and are firmly committed to continuing to do this (even if that means 5am starts in sub-zero temperatures!). However, we also need to cover our costs, which we are no longer doing…

We’ve calculated that it currently costs us £1.82 to produce and bottle each litre of milk, before we’ve even delivered it. It then costs us a further 36p to deliver each item to your doorstep, or 96p per delivery on average. In theory, this cost of delivery is included in the prices you pay for our milk and other products. But it doesn’t take a maths whizz to work out that at our current prices, we are making a loss on every litre of milk we sell, which simply isn’t sustainable - and we’re expecting some of our production costs to go up even further in the New Year.

So, after a lot of deliberation, we have decided to make the following changes to our pricing, effective from January 1st…

Products (not including delivery)

- Whole & part-skimmed milk will both now be priced at £2 per litre

- Our natural yoghurt will now be £2.20 per jar

- And our ice cream will be now be £6 per 700ml jar. However, we are reducing the price of the 2-litre tubs to £12 each

- Cream will stay the same at £1.60 for a small jar and £2.90 for a large jar.

Delivery

Doorstep delivery will now be charged separately at £4 per month if you receive one delivery a week, and £8 per month if you receive two deliveries per week. This charge will remain the same regardless of the number of additional items you buy.

 

We realise these increases may come as quite a shock to some at a time when many of you will already be feeling squeezed, but hope that you understand why they are necessary. If you think you will struggle with the new pricing, we have the following options:

  1. Collect your order from our pick-up fridge in North Aston. The price of the products will still be increased but you’ll save the monthly delivery fee.

  2. Add extra products to your regular order (eggs, yoghurt, bread, ice cream and meat) to make the most of the fixed delivery charge

  3. Change your delivery from twice a week to once a week.

  4. Join our small list of “flexi customers”, who allow us to pause their weekly order at very short notice, to help us cope with unexpected milk shortfalls. From now on, we are giving a 10% discount off our meat and ice cream to all of our flexi customers.

If none of the above options work for you, we will completely understand if you decide to shop elsewhere. However, if you really want to stay with us (which of course we’d love you to), but simply can’t afford to, please send us an email and we will see what we can do to support you in these tough times.

We are busy working on how we can add more value for our loyal customers, and look forward to welcoming you to the farm for guided tours & special events in the near future. Look out for news about these in the upcoming newsletters!

In the meantime, we really hope you have a wonderful and relaxing Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Best wishes,

James & Vicky, Graham, Nick, Will & Sasha and the rest of the North Aston Farms team, and our cows: Leah, Darla, Precious, Margaret, Lottie, Jocie, Florence, Raindrop, Ivy, Lisa, Blossom, Violet, Holly, Carla, Butterfly, Connie, Mary, Iona & Sprout.

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