Independent Food Economy: Scale, Growth and What's Driving It

A crab boat off Brixham, a cheese dairy above the Dart, a sausage maker on a Newton Abbot industrial estate: different trades, same region, and increasingly the same story. Independent food and drink businesses across Devon, Cornwall, Somerset and Dorset are growing faster than the manufacturing sector around them, selling more directly to customers than they did a decade ago, and doing it against real cost pressure rather than in spite of an easy market. The scale of it is larger, and more precisely measured, than most people assume.

The scale of it today

Food and drink manufacturing in the South West generated £2.0 billion in gross value added in the latest year measured, according to Food and Drink Federation analysis of ONS data - up 2.1% on the year before and 42.5% since 2017. The sector employs 32,000 people across 1,235 businesses and exported £0.9 billion of goods, itself up 19.5% year on year. The region has added 2,500 food and drink manufacturing jobs since 2020.

That figure covers manufacturing alone. Widen the lens to the whole farm-to-fork chain - farming, fishing, processing, wholesale - and the Great South West's own Agrifood Industries Growth Plan, published in February 2026, puts the region's gross value added at £10.1 billion in 2023, supporting 320,000 jobs. The primary production behind it runs to 21,451 farms, 1,052 registered fishing vessels and 574 approved food producers, most of them small and medium-sized enterprises: dairy farms, fishing boats, cheesemakers and artisan brewers rather than large processors.

Measure	South West food & drink manufacturing	Whole South West agrifood chain
Gross value added	£2.0bn	£10.1bn
Jobs	32,000	320,000
Businesses / units	1,235 businesses	21,451 farms · 1,052 fishing vessels · 574 approved food producers
Source	Food and Drink Federation / ONS	Great South West Agrifood Industries Growth Plan, 2026

The two figures measure different things and shouldn't be added together - one is manufacturing turned into finished product, the other the entire chain from field and boat to processor - but both point the same way. A decade earlier, in 2019, the House of Commons Library recorded 1,105 food manufacturing enterprises in the South West, 13% of the England total, with turnover of £4 billion. Between 2010 and 2019 the region's food manufacturing gross value added grew 16%, against 10% for England as a whole. The region has been out-growing the national average for most of the period since.

Productivity has closed a real gap over the same stretch. In 2015, the Great South West's food and drink manufacturing sector generated £45,026 of gross value added per worker, 29% below the English average of £63,319. From 2015 to 2023, that figure grew 4.3% a year in the Great South West against 0.7% a year across England, substantially closing the gap - evidence of sustained investment in processing capacity and productivity rather than growth built purely on volume.

Where the growth is actually coming from

Ask the businesses themselves and a clear post-pandemic pattern shows up. A 2023 survey of South West food and beverage businesses, run by PR agency Grayling through the regional trade body Taste of the West, found 72% of respondents feeling positive about the future, with 85% of those businesses independent rather than chain-owned. Almost half, 42%, had grown by more than 20% since 2020; only 10% had stayed flat.

Part of that is a straightforward shift toward buying direct. Nationally, farm shops now generate an estimated £1.4 billion in sales and employ 25,000 people, according to research by Harper Adams University for the Farm Retail Association - Britain's most substantial survey of the sector to date. A third of farm shops have opened in the last ten years, and by August 2025 the Farm Retail Association's 300 members were still reporting growing footfall and revenue. The pattern holds locally: Greendale Farm Shop near Exeter sells beef from its own farm and fish from its own boats alongside cheese, clotted cream, fruit, veg and Devon-brewed cider from other local producers, and has grown into enough of a destination to host its own annual food festival at Exeter Castle rather than simply operating a till.

Some of the growth is institutional rather than purely commercial. Taste of the West, established in 1991, describes itself as the UK's largest independent regional food group and, at its peak, counted around 1,000 producer and hospitality members across Cornwall, Devon, Dorset, Gloucestershire, Somerset, Wiltshire and the Channel Islands. Roughly 350 food and drink producers enter its awards programme each year, judged by independent panels of chefs, food writers and buyers, alongside The Source, an annual trade show in Exeter that has become a fixture on the region's hospitality calendar. An accreditation scheme like that does something a single business can't do alone: it gives a small, unfamiliar producer a recognisable mark of quality the moment it reaches a shelf or a menu outside its home county.

Selling direct, not just through a supermarket

The clearest sign of a maturing direct-sale market isn't the volume, it's the infrastructure now built to support it. Sole of Discretion, a collective of small-scale fishers working out of Plymouth harbour, sells its low-impact-caught fish and shellfish through Wylde, an online farmers' market platform, with deliveries running Fridays and Saturdays and no minimum order required on fish alone. That's a materially different route to market than a fisher selling only to a wholesaler or a single restaurant account - it puts a named boat and a stated method directly in front of the customer, and it depends on digital ordering infrastructure that didn't widely exist for small producers a decade ago.

The economics of direct sale are real but not simple. A farm shop or online direct-sale operation has to build a customer base, a delivery or collection system and a marketing presence that a wholesale contract never required - which is exactly why the businesses succeeding at it tend to be the ones treating it as a proper retail operation, not a sideline. Farm Retail Association chair Emma Mosey put the sector's 2026 strategy plainly: don't try to compete with supermarkets on price, compete on the things a short supply chain can prove that a supermarket can't - provenance, traceability and the fact that, by the association's own estimate, roughly 75p in every pound spent with a farm shop stays in the local economy.

Scaling without losing the story

Growth doesn't always mean staying small. Sharpham Cheese started making cheese on the Sharpham Estate above the River Dart in 1982 and stayed there for more than forty years before moving in 2024 to a purpose-built dairy at the South Devon Food Hub near Totnes - a 7,000 square foot site twice the size of the original, built specifically to grow the business beyond its West Country base. It became the first UK cheesemaker to achieve certified B Corporation status, and two of its cheeses, Ticklemore and Savour, took the top three-star rating at the 2026 Great Taste Awards.

Westaway Sausages, based on an industrial estate in Newton Abbot, tells a similar story from a different angle: a Devon manufacturer now supplying retailers nationwide, not just regionally, while still winning Taste of the West's Sustainability Champion award in both 2023 and 2024 for switching to 100% compostable packaging made from uncoated, unbleached card. Both businesses show the same pattern - regional independents that have scaled production and distribution without becoming anonymous, keeping the maker's name and method attached to the product as it grows rather than trading it away for volume.

The headwinds

None of this growth has happened without real pressure. In the same 2023 Taste of the West survey, the main strains businesses reported over the previous year were soaring energy prices (34%), rising food production costs (29%) and labour shortages (20%). Asked what would help most, businesses answered inflation coming down (50%) and energy prices falling (34%) - not a change in consumer demand, which they largely reported as holding up.

The instability isn't only at the level of individual businesses. Taste of the West itself, the UK's largest independent regional food group and the body that ran that 2023 survey, collapsed into administration in 2025 after more than thirty years running the South West's food and drink awards programme. It has since been bought and relaunched by a new consortium of regional food and drink figures, who are not seeking to recoup their investment and describe the aim as keeping small producers, family-run farms and innovators with a voice. It's a useful, honest corrective to any picture of steady growth: even the institutions built to support this sector aren't immune to the same cost pressures as the businesses they represent.

Where it's heading

The Great South West's own growth plan sets out two paths from its £10.1 billion 2023 baseline. Left on its existing trajectory - continuing the 0.53% average annual real-terms growth recorded between 2015 and 2023 - the region's agrifood gross value added would reach £11.2 billion by 2043, an 11% increase. With sustained investment in processing capacity, agritech and productivity, the plan estimates the sector could instead reach £13.9 billion, a 38% increase, with each additional 0.1 percentage point of annual growth worth over £250 million by 2043.

Part of that ambition rests on building more regional processing capacity rather than sending raw produce elsewhere to be turned into finished goods - the region currently produces a share of national primary output more than two and a half times larger than its share of food processing, which the growth plan treats as unrealised value rather than a settled state. Support infrastructure is already forming around that goal: Food WorksSW gives the region's food and drink businesses access to specialist facilities and technical advice to scale up production and meet certification standards, the kind of practical help that let a business like Sharpham Cheese make the jump from an estate outbuilding to a purpose-built dairy. English wine is a newer thread in the same story - Devon, Cornwall and Dorset now host a growing number of vineyards within a fast-expanding English wine region, cool-climate viticulture that barely existed here a generation ago and is now winning international medals.

What connects all of it - farm shops, direct-sale fishers, scaling cheesemakers, a still-recovering trade body - is that none of it is coasting. Growth in this region has come from businesses actively building new routes to their customers and new capacity to meet demand, against energy and cost pressures that haven't gone away. The Guide's Makers listings are where to find the businesses behind these numbers directly - independent producers across all four counties, added as they're found rather than as a finished directory.

Sources

• Food and Drink Federation, Powering Communities: National and Regional Report 2024 - fdf.org.uk
• Great South West, Maximising Growth across the Great South West's Agrifood Industries, February 2026 - greatsouthwest.co.uk
• House of Commons Library, Farming and Food Statistics: South West England - commonslibrary.parliament.uk
• Farm Retail Association / Harper Adams University farm shop research, 2022, and Farmers Weekly, August 2025 - farmretail.co.uk, fwi.co.uk
• Taste of the West / Grayling South West food and beverage business survey, 2023 - tasteofthewest.co.uk
• Devon Live, Famous Taste of the West awards rescued after company collapse, August 2025
• The Grocer, Emma Mosey (Farm Retail Association), What challenges and opportunities do farm shops face in 2026?, December 2025