Kingham is not the most obvious place for a revolution to start. “England’s favourite village 2004”, according to Country Life, is a sleepy Cotswold sandstone haven, where the station car park is full of Volvo XC90s, and the primary school keeps a flock of chickens.
But tucked away in the corner around the back of the Kingham Plough rests a revolutionary bit of kit that could change the way we shop for our food – a milk vending machine.
In some countries this would be unremarkable. In Japan, where there is one vending machine for every 23 citizens, you can buy anything from pot plants to pornography, eggs and live lobsters from these coin-operated gizmos.
Britain had a few vending machines selling long-life milk in the 1960s and 1970s, but in recent years these boxes have been associated with overpriced chocolate bars, fizzy drinks and forlorn sandwiches. Not fresh food. And certainly not organic, non-homogenised milk from Guernsey cows.
The Kingham machine works a treat. Pop in some coins and out comes, first of all, an empty glass litre bottle with a screw-top lid. Pop in some more coins and fresh milk comes out of the spout to fill your bottle – a cold, thick, yellowy, luscious liquid that is a glorious reminder of what milk used to look and taste like.
The machine is the brainchild of Adam and Caroline Fleming, who run Nell’s Dairy seven miles down the road, and who fill it up with fresh milk every two days.
“We spotted one on holiday in Italy two years ago,” says Caroline. “We were sitting in a village square near Pisa, and there was this milk-vending machine outside a shop. People were filling up jugs and bottles even though the shop was shut. We thought it could be a great opportunity to sell our milk directly to the public without selling it through the horrible supermarkets. Oh, I’d better not say that.”
It is no secret that most dairy farmers have an ambivalent view of supermarkets. The milk industry, having spent the last two decades lurching from one disaster to another, hit a new low this summer. Threats of strikes, marches on Parliament and mud-slinging on an agricultural scale was only resolved after the processors signed a voluntary code of practice.
The Flemings, who admit they are “gentlemen farmers” (Adam is part of the banking dynasty), have a mere 10 milking cows and six who are in calf. Supplying a supermarket would never be economic. These refrigerated vending machines – a second has just opened at the Cotswold Farm Park – mean they can sell their milk to locals at any time of day or night, long after Kingham Stores has closed for the evening.
The pub – run by their friends Miles Lampson and Emily Watkins, the chef – receives milk at a discount in return for hosting the machine. Lampson says it has helped bring a bit of extra traffic: “It’s been much, much more successful than I thought it would be. If your wife asks you to pop out and buy a pint of milk, are you more likely to go to the shop, or the pub?”
But there is a catch – the milk is eye-wateringly expensive, at £2 a litre (the glass bottle, if you don’t take your own jug, costs an extra £1). This is nearly four times the price of supermarket milk, and even a substantial premium on top of the organic milk sold in the local shop at £1.35 a litre.
Lampson says the price is well worth it. “Guernsey milk is rarer than caviar in Britain.”
Of course, this is hardly an impoverished corner of Britain. Daylesford Organic farm shop is down the road. And the Kingham Plough itself is the eatery of choice for the notorious “Chipping Norton” set of David Cameron, Jeremy Clarkson and Alex James, who can tuck into venison-and-beetroot pie and wash it down with a bottle of Château Léoville Barton, at £175 a bottle. Watkins won’t say whether the prime minister has used the milk machine. “We’re just a regular pub; we don’t want to appear to be toffs selling to other toffs,” she says, a bit unconvincingly.
But even the proper locals (rather than the Le-Chameau-welly-wearing metropolitan types) are relaxed about the price. Anne Skeats, standing by her Land Rover, says: “If I wanted it for something special to make a pudding, the price is just not a problem.” Most of the villagers are fans of the machine, though some point out that because it is full-fat, the milk can only be a special treat, rather than used on a daily basis.
The sales figures back this up. In the three-and-a-half months it has been in operation, just 1,100 litres have been sold. But from such small steps, major retail revolutions have been born. After all, Sainsbury’s started as a butter-and-milk stall in Covent Garden.
If this automated milk dispenser was to take off, could vending machines become the next supermarkets?
