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About
Hodmedod imagines a better food system of connected and resilient communities spanning good farming, fair trading and enjoyable wholesome eating.
Since 2012 we’ve built a network of amazing farmers, food producers and customers who care about their food's provenance and impact. We now produce over 100 minimally processed wholefoods – all from diverse crops, grown in ways that are better for soil, climate and communities.
Here we look at the first 10 years of Hodmedod with a continuing timeline picking up our story from 2022 on...
Josiah, Nick & William work with Transition Norwich to understand how the city can best feed itself within planetary boundaries. They realise that fava beans, widely grown around the city but little eaten there, can play a big part in a food system that's better for the environment and for us.
Nick joins Gary Rhodes on Great British Food Revival to talk about the neglected British fava bean, first grown in Britain by Iron Age farmers but now little eaten here. Gary cooked up a tasty fava bean "hummus" while Mr Falafel cooked... fava falafel.
Hodmedod is launched and in December - just in time to catch the TV excitement - our website goes live with a range of three products - British-grown split fava beans, whole fava beans & "Kabuki" marrowfat peas. All packed in lovingly illustrated cartons with recipe booklets for these little known pulses. (We had a lot of time on our hands.)
The Guardian's new Feast supplement features Hodmedod's revival of the British fava bean. The first of so many mentions in the Guardian that we start calling it our newsletter - which is handy, because our actual newsletter is, well, infrequent.
We add the amazing "Black Badger" Carlin Pea, move into the first Hodmedod HQ - up two flights of stairs in an old fire station - and feel ready for our first trade show at London's Olympia. We’re reminded how heavy pulses are and regret the two flights of stairs. Our limited range lends itself to a geometic aesthetic.
In March 2014 an email arrives in the Hodmedod inbox from Mark Lea, the organic farmer of Green Acres farm in Shropshire. We visit him and by the second week of April Mark is sowing four varieties of pea to grow for us - yellow, blue, marrowfat and carlin. None of us realises that’s quite a difficult thing to do. Mark has grown organic crops for us every year since, but never again attempted four varieties of peas in the same year.
Also in 2014 we start working with Peter Fairs and his son Andrew. Peter had been growing quinoa since the 1980s but only recently managed to select a naturally sweet population from his crop that was suitable for food use without extensive washing or processing. We launch his first crop of 4.5 tonnes in the summer of 2014; it sells out almost immediately.
Later in the summer we take our first batch of roasted peas to River Cottage for the summer food festival. They go down a treat, as does the Black Badger Tagine and Yellow Pea Dahl cooked up by chef Gelf Alderson. But our backs don’t thank us for carrying half a tonne of beans up and down our HQ fire escape stairs in the middle of the night - we sign the lease on our first Bean Store in Suffolk. There are no stairs.
Joe joins as our first employee, responsible for the daily operations of our new Bean Store HQ in Halesworth. He's helped us grow our team to over 20 and still plays a central role at Hodmedod ten years on.
Having launched Hodmedod with beans pretty much no one had heard of, we make forgotten grain naked barley our first cereal. (It takes us another few years to realise this isn’t actually how food businesses work.) Inspired by the research of Edward Dickin, Katherine Steele and others we see naked barley’s huge potential as a resilient and beneficial part of diverse, low input arable rotations, as well as a nutritious, versatile and delicious food.
Finally the world catches up and formally recognises just how amazing pulses are - great for our soil, our health, our meals and the planet! Nick joins Sheila Dillon, Jenny Chandler and Sanjay Kumar to celebrate the wonders of pulses for BBC Radio 4's Food Programme.
Our Organic Carlin Peas, now available canned and dried, win best pantry product in the Soil Association BOOM awards. Mark Lea doesn’t join us in London but gets so many congratulatory message notifications overnight that when he glances at his phone in the morning he thinks his barn must be on fire. We realise the incredible connecting power of simply putting the farmer’s name on our packs.
In March we roll up the door of our Bean Store in Halesworth to host a lunch of British-grown pulses and grains for judges Sheila Dillon and Giorgio Locatelli and the BBC Food Programme team. In September we're over the moon to win the best food producer award at the ceremony in Bristol. We break all the rules by trying to get as many of our farmer group as possible on stage.
In August Josiah meets up with Jamie Oliver and Jimmy Doherty in a field of beans to talk about, yes, beans, and other pulses. Jamie cooks up Egyptian ful medames while Josiah criticises his method. Still, it all airs on Jamie's Friday Night Feast in December.
Through 2017 we and our farmers are busy with the first ever commercial British crops of lentils and chia. Tim Gawthroup grew a fine field of lentils in Hertfordshire following two years of trial work we’d done at Wakelyns Agroforestry while Peter and Andrew Fairs harvested chia in Essex.
We help initiate and run the British Dal Festival to raise the profile of pulses through the much loved and various dish of dal and its cousin soupy dishes of split pulses from around the world. The Dal Trail sees dal highlighted at the centre of menus in restaurants across Bristol and beyond.
Having out-grown our original Bean Store in Halesworth, Suffolk we move into a larger shed up the road in Brampton. We get ourselves a forklift truck and buy a lot of pallet racking - it’s all feeling quite serious now. Our first visitors are a group of bean growers from Sweden, part of a knowledge exchange project bringing together British and Swedish farmers.
In collaboration with Henry Raker we harvest the Britain's first commercial chickpea harvest from the sandy soils of Norfolk's Breckland. The second harvest in 2020 features on BBC's Countryfile and we think we’ve cracked it… Year three is a disaster. It remains a challenge to grow consistent crops of chickpeas in the UK, but our work inspires the research community, who also start taking an interest in our self-funded lentil work.
A year ahead of the first crop of this new intensely coloured pea being sown in Britain we offer our followers samples and ask for suggested names for the variety. Thankfully Pinky McPinkpea doesn’t gain traction, we discover the global rights owners of ‘Pink Panther’ are quite litigious, and Flamingo is adopted as the registered varietal name.
We're inundated with orders through Lockdown as new customers sought out available supplies of pulses, grains and more. For a while we sell only 5kg bags but soon make our full range available again. We take the opportunity to offer other producers of good food a new opening, initially listing bread from Penny Bun Bakehouse, who had lost all their restaurant customers, then other carefully chosen foods.
Through the quiet evenings of 2020 we develop the first Diversity Blend grist (later to be available as flour) in an inspiring partnership with Vanessa Kimbell of The Sourdough School. Diversity Blend #2 Meadow (yes, #2 is the first, don't ask) combines 14 grains, seeds, pulses and flours to reflect the diversity of crop and wild plants you might find in or by a field. Blend #0 follows (still no #1).
In the summer of 2021 we start milling small batches of varietal and diversity blend flours through our very own New American Stonemill.
