When Prince Charles first entered the world of retail, he was nearly laughed straight out of it. “A shop-soiled Royal!” jeered the headlines, branding the new business a “vanity project” with no hope of success.
Two decades later, it is Charles who has the last laugh. Duchy Originals, his organic food range, has grown to encompass 230 products, sold in 30 countries from Australia to Japan. Sales of traditional oaten biscuits - the first item in the Duchy brand, made from oats harvested on his Highgrove estate - have reached 70 million in total.
It was no coincidence that Charles’s first business venture focused on organic food: his devotion to farming and the natural world stems from a childhood spent among the rolling green estates of Sandringham and Balmoral. He has always said that had he not been a prince he would have been a farmer.
“Right from the start,” he explained at a celebration of Duchy Originals in September, “preserving our heritage, upholding traditional skills and supporting our local communities were of fundamental importance to the brand.”
But as well as indulging a passion, founding Duchy Originals represented a savvy business move. As custodian of the Duchy of Cornwall, 53,154 hectares of land in south-west England, Charles had already embarked on a number of programmes to reverse what he saw as the destructive trend of modern agriculture and stop the disintegration of its countryside communities.
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10 Nov 2013Producing foodstuffs from the crops growing on the estate seemed the next logical step - and the ideal money-spinner for his charities, for which the brand has now raised £11 million from its profits. When Duchy Originals launched in 1992, earthy potatoes were plucked from the fields, butter churned in its creameries and flour milled from its golden grain.
The timing of the range couldn’t have been better. In the early Nineties, organic food was far from the supermarket staple it is today. Duchy Originals, a brand founded entirely on the principles of food that “is good, does good, tastes good”, was somewhat ahead of its time.
“We didn’t make organic products back then,” says Jim Walker, joint managing director of Walkers Shortbread, the Scottish company behind the famous oaten biscuit. “The Prince encouraged us to start and it’s been a happy partnership ever since.”
The decade marked a surge in interest in organic produce, underpinned by research that showed food made sustainably and without artificial fertilisers tasted better and was healthier than ordinary produce. Sales soared: between 1994 and 2004, the organic food market rose in value from £100 million to £1.21 billion.
Now, 86 per cent of British households buy organic dairy, fruit and veg in their weekly shop. And, as artisan bakeries, butchers and delicatessens multiplied on our high streets, it was Duchy Originals products that stocked the shelves.
From creamy Stilton to fruity chutneys, sparkling apple cider to fragrant smoked salmon, the brand today comprises a small but carefully-selected range of products. Each one is approved by Prince Charles, who regularly tastes ingredients and recipes.
For the oaten biscuit, he sampled over 100 different products before agreeing on the right combination of crumbly and buttery, savoury but sweet. “He works much harder than most people realise,” explains Walker. “At the start he ate a lot of biscuits.”
It hasn’t all been straightforward, however. His critics have remained, with some seizing on controversial products - such as a herbal remedy launched in 2008 - as evidence that the Prince is letting personal passions obscure his business nous. Others have questioned his apparent double standards: a bottle of Royal Deeside mineral water travels 6,000 miles to luxury Gulf supermarkets, despite the group’s commitment to “the smallest environmental footprint”.
Though the brand was doing well, with an annual turnover of around £1 million in the late Nineties, it struggled to expand its market reach, with products mostly stocked in farm shops and independent delicatessens. Duchy started making a loss, and was badly hit by the recession in 2007, bumping balance sheets into the red to the tune of £3.3 million.
The turning point came in 2009, when Charles licensed the brand to Waitrose. The supermarket promised to invest in the company and pay a royalty fee, and, in return, was granted the exclusive right to sell its products. Now, annual profits top £2.8 million, and, thanks in part to its tie-up with Duchy, Waitrose holds a 22.6 per cent share of the UK organic market (up from 5.9 per cent in previous years).
“We have always shared similar values to the brand,” says Graham Cassie of Waitrose. “Duchy Originals enables customers to identify the best organic foods. The brand is continually innovating and the Prince of Wales remains very close to it.”
Key to its enduring success is Charles’s sustained relationship with the farmers who form the backbone of Duchy Originals. “He is concerned about all types of agriculture, which makes him a great champion for people like me,” says John Tuft, who raises free-range chickens for the brand from his 240-acre farm in the village of Ballinderry, County Antrim. When Charles visited in 2011, Tuft says he was “very passionate; he sat down in my dining room and had a cup of tea with the whole family”.
Guy Tullberg, managing director of Tracklements in Wiltshire, which has made Duchy Originals chutneys and preserves for 12 years, says the relationship has helped the company “nurture
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