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”.
