Wow, another year has flown by here at the Chilli Farm!
We started the year with a flurry of new faces at the Farm; Giordy joined as our events co-ordinator and is the smiling face that you’ll see if you come across our market stall at any events in 2025… Kate joined as our Administrator as well, and has spent her time ever since getting everything and everyone in ship shape across the business!
We shut down production for 3 weeks at the beginning of the year in order to renovate our warehouse and production kitchen – Manager Ben had a big job on his hands to keep everyone organised, informed and keep stock levels on point! This big overhaul gave us lots more storage space in a 2-storey warehouse, as well as fully enclosing and doubling the floorspace of Dan’s production kitchen.
This fully renovated and modernised production space allowed us to successfully apply for SALSA food hygiene certification – this is a huge milestone for a small food business like ours, and just shows our serious commitment to super high standards of food hygiene and safety – we also passed first time with flying colours which the SALSA auditor told us is very rare indeed!
Amrit got to work building a new, undercover workshop and work area for the Horticulture Team – this space allows them somewhere (relatively) warm and dry to work when the weather is being unkind, as well as organised storage for the MANY pieces of equipment that they need throughout the year. The workshop area also formed the venue for our Spring Growing Workshops.
We said goodbye to Chef Dave who took his well-earned retirement after 10+ years at the Farm; Dave was involved in developing some of our longstanding and very popular sauces, and also had a reputation as a Mr Fix It who could turn his hand to anything, so he will be sorely missed around here! Dave’s protégé Chef Dan took the reins from him and has been running a super-efficient kitchen ever since, what a great addition to the team he has been!
During 2024 we also said goodbye to another lovely and hugely missed member of our SDCF family; we were all devastated when Justin our Shop Manager passed away from cancer in the summer. Justin was the life and soul of our Farm Shop and was the creative mind behind much of our social media and marketing. The Farm and the Shop are full of happy memories of Justin which we all treasure.
We took the next step this year in our RHS journey, with a show garden at RHS Hyde Hall over the summer – we were delighted to be awarded a 5 Flower Gold award for our display garden! This marks our 2nd 5 Flower Gold award, having received one for our display at RHS Rosemoor in 2023. This year we also exhibited at RHS Hampton Court (though we didn’t have a display garden there) – but we were able to exhibit both plants and produce which went down really well with the RHS crowd!
We launched more new products in 2024 – we started our Caribbean Collection, inspired by Amrit’s island home of Trinidad & Tobago, with 2 new products – Mango Chilli Sauce and Ginger & Lime Chilli Chocolate.
For the 2024 Festive Season we launched a limited edition Winter Spice Chilli Chocolate too – this was dreamed up by Elsa our Chocolatier. This is going down really well since we have had our Christmassy Chalet at Exeter Christmas Market – our biggest ever market stall!
We don’t sit still for long here at SDCF so we can’t wait to share with you what 2025 brings!