“In a recent piece I wrote about whether a regeneratively farmed KitKat was progress or just good PR, and I left a question hanging: is a chocolate bar a worthy home for some of our highest-integrity produce? This time I want to turn the lens around and look at the people growing the wheat – because the more interesting story, and the more human one, sits upstream of the wrapper.” (Ian Gould)
The wheat in that KitKat wafer comes from Wildfarmed, the regenerative grain business led by Andy Cato . If you don’t know the origin story, it is a good one: a Groove Armada DJ with no farming background reads an article about the environmental cost of modern food, buys a farm, learns to grow wheat without the chemical toolkit everyone told him was essential, and turns it into bread. With George Lamb and Edd Lees he builds that into a company that has, in a remarkably short time, put regenerative flour into Marks & Spencer, Gail’s, Franco Manca, Greggs breakfast clubs and now, via Nestlé, one of the best-known confectionery brands in the country.
That is not a small achievement. Persuading farmers to grow cereals differently is hard. Creating a market for those cereals from a standing start is harder still, and arguably the thing Wildfarmed should be proudest of. But the story of how they got here is also a story about what happens when an ideal meets a combine, that is the part worth examining honestly and not to throw stones, but because the lessons in it belong to all of us trying to build markets for better farming.