One 79-year old’s £58m B Corp business
If you are looking for some good business news to start the year then this story about how a former Gloucestershire housewife created a B Corp empire today worth almost £60m a year could be it.
Dear reader,
A very happy new year to you. Welcome to the first email ‘edition’ of 2026, albeit a rather slimmed-down single-story version compared with what some regular readers will be used to.
A bite-sized starter for 2026, if you like.
We’ve decided to move away from our trademark longer reads two days a week to produce something a little more digestible first thing on a Monday.
From Friday we’ll be back with editions featuring our usual briefing notes, diary dates, and from Monday all that and our charity of the week feature too.
If you want your charity featured, or a charity you are supporting, or a fundraising event or similar, please do let me know.
And we’ll be reintroducing our paywalls onto more Friday editions too in order to help make what we do pay.
What we do is deliver you some real journalism about Gloucestershire in a media landscape we feel is rather lacking any of the same.
Fear not, there will be plenty of other reading material on those Friday editions sitting the free side of the paywall.
But to kick off 2026 we thought we’d try to sell you the story below about a former housewife from Gloucestershire who started a business which today clocks up just shy of £60 million a year.
She’s 79 years old, still inspiring and still in charge.
We hope for those of you who managed to get a Christmas break had a good one, and for those who worked their way through instead, that you managed to enjoy yourselves anyway.
Here’s to 2026!
Best regards,
Andrew Merrell (editor).
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One 79-year old’s £58m B Corp business
If you are looking for some good business news to start the year then this story about how a former Gloucestershire housewife created a B Corp empire today worth almost £60m a year could be it.
By Andrew Merrell.
When a former air stewardess and grammar school girl first started to talk about turning her family’s farm organic in the mid 1970s her husband apparently called her “barmy”.
Today Carole Bamford’s husband has probably long since eaten his words.
From that seed of an idea, his wife, Lady Carole Bamford to you and I, has since created a multi-million pound empire headquartered right here in Gloucestershire.
Her Cotswold-based Daylesford Organic has just published its annual results, revealing the luxury brand moved from a £4,840,395 loss the previous year to a pre-tax profit of £1,251,549 for the year to 31 March 2025.
Turnover increased from £55m to £58m. Adjusted Ebitda (its earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortisation) reached £2,815,326 compared to an adjusted Ebitda loss of £2,068,518 the year before.
Lady Bamford, the wife of JCB boss Lord Anthony Bamford, said the results had been driven by strong sales growth and improved operational efficiency.
“Turnover grew 4.7 per cent to £58,069.976 supported by increased demand across retail stores and wholesale channels as our offering continued to resonate with customers, particularly as we expanded our focus on gifting,” she said.
It’s a big enough to make Daylesford one of the Top 100 Businesses in Gloucestershire, a series currently sponsored by accountants Randall & Payne that Raikes puts together throughout the year tracking the fortunes of the county’s biggest firms by turnover.
“Wholesale saw strong demand through key partners and the year marked the first full year of Heritage House, a dedicated events space at Daylesford Farm, which enabled us to host landmark events and brand experiences at a scale not previously possible.”
All of which “strengthened the foundation of the business”, positioning it well for the year ahead, added Lady Bamford.
Other challenges are somewhat of the business’s own making, with staff turnover up from 53.3 per cent to 58.8 per cent. Staff numbers fell from 504 to 461.
But there are reasons to be optimistic here too. According to Lady Bamford underlying staff turnover across the group actually improved during the period.
The rise in the headline figure blamed on the relocation of a number of head office roles from London to the Cotswolds leading to a higher staff turnover than the previous period.
According to Daylesford Organic’s annual report, the principal risk it faces is an uncertain economic environment, with consumer spending remaining under pressure.
But it is convinced its focus should remain on building a premium luxury brand and a loyal customer base.
The story of the birth of the business is said to go back to 1976 when Carole Bamford was in her garden at Wootton when she noticed her roses were wilting – a result of pesticides being sprayed by a neighbouring farm.
When she got talking to a farmer at the Royal Agricultural Show shortly afterwards she came away convinced organic was the future for the family farm.
It was when she told her husband about her plans that, according to the Financial Times, he declared them “barmy”.
But she persisted, and it is credit to her determination that she succeeded. The journey to take her Wootton farm organic took seven years. The farm at Daylesford near Moreton-in-Marsh, bought by the Bamfords in 1988, took another three years to become organic.
It is here, almost 25 years ago, that the Daylesford Organic empire began to take root after she started to look to the future as her four children began to leave home, and converted one of the barns into a farm shop.
Today her farm is regarded as one of the most innovative in the country and a leader in everything from rare breed cattle programme to agroforestry and wetlands projects.
Daylesford Organic is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Bamford Collection. The Bamford Collection Group has no external bank debt and held cash balances of £9 million as of 29 March 2025.
Daylesford Organic is currently spread across three retail sites in London – in Brompton Cross, Pimlico and Notting Hill - and three restaurants at farm sites.
Lady Bamford remains the ultimate shareholder.