Salcombe Dairy

Salcombe Dairy traces back to 1979, when Peter and Tricia Howard started making real dairy ice cream from a small stone-built shed at the bottom of Coronation Road in Salcombe, using fresh milk from a local farm. Peter was doing slow food before the phrase existed - just good ingredients, made properly, sold from the shed. Over four decades on, the same recipes are still the backbone of the range, and the business has passed into the hands of the Boscawen and Bly families, who've kept the artisan, small-batch approach rather than scaling it into something mass-produced.

The dairy now makes non-dairy ice creams and sorbets alongside the traditional dairy lines, and chocolate has become part of the offer too, sold through the Salcombe shop and further afield including a parlour that's opened in Dartmouth. It's the kind of business that's grown steadily over forty years without losing the small-shed, family-run character it started with.