shelf talk Lucinda La Velle, whose grandparents moved to Millets Farm in the 1950s. She is now joint site manager with brother Ben Carter.
Managing a maze of attractions With an ever-widening offer stretching from its pioneering maize maze to Wimbledon tennis teas, family-owned Millets Farm Centre has all the advantages – and all the management challenges – of a highly diversified operation
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he doesn’t look it, but Lucinda La Velle admits to feeling a bit frazzled when we sit down in the Farmhouse Kitchen restaurant at Millets Farm Centre to talk about her family’s third-generation business. La Velle has just emerged from the Centre office and whizzed behind the café counter to rustle up a very competent cappuccino – just one sign of the multi-tasking she and brother Ben Carter have to undertake in their shared role of site manager. “We both have that job title, but we’re really general dogsbodies,” she says, not entirely in jest. Like anyone brought up in a family business, she’s been mucking in with everything from bag-packing to trolley collection since her school days.
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April 2017 | Vol.18 Issue 3
Now, she is as likely to be found clearing tables in the café-restaurant as attending to the financial or HR duties that are more in her ‘official’ line of work. “At Christmas I’ll spend quite a lot of time behind the deli counter, wrapping cheese,” she tells me. The role has become more of a beast, she says, as new elements – from an ice cream parlour to summer barbecues – are steadily added to
Deli of the Month INTERVIEW BY MICK WHITWORTH
what is far from being a simple farm shop operation. Despite the presence of events manager Jo Kent and site development manager Daren Fisher, it is stilll a monster to manage. “Although we have department managers who can run their section to a high standard, you need people who can move between them and oversee things. Particularly in the summer, we’re getting pulled more and more in all directions.” Based near the village of Frilford, a few miles from Oxford, today’s Farm Centre began life as a pick-your-own strawberry shed on the family farm. La Velle’s grandparents, John and Christine Carter, bought Millets Farm in 1952 and ran it for many years as a mixed dairy and arable operation. “Then my father and uncle [Nigel and Tony Carter] got involved,” she says, “and brought the business to where it is today.” Pick-your-own was developed in the 1970s. The original shed eventually became a shop and café,
and then 25 years ago the current farm shop building was erected, and it remains the financial core of the Farm Centre. The farm is still productive, but the cattle have gone and the focus today is very much on fruit and veg – contributing to a fresh produce section in the shop that represents 25% of sales. But bolt-on attractions have always been important at a site