by James Cooper, milling writer for Milling and Grain Sweeping through the gentle folds of the Cotswold hills by motorbike on a late June Monday morning, I’m presented with a […]
by James Cooper, milling writer for Milling and Grain
Sweeping through the gentle folds of the Cotswold hills by motorbike on a late June Monday morning, I’m presented with a bucolic image that echoes unchanged back through centuries. Spilt grain lies scattered on the warm road and, where overgrown hedgerows have teased it from passing bales, straw decorates the verge. The dusty aroma of freshly harvested grain still hanging in the air and razored golden fields all around, brings childhood memories of freedom from school and endless summer.
It’s hard to imagine harvest time ever feeling or looking any different. And then there it is: a huge old Victorian red brick flour mill building towering above the landscape on the edge of an old railway in a natural fold of the hills.
Family ownership and long-term thinking
In a large meeting room of a modern, purpose-built sales and marketing suite I’m introduced to the eighth generation of millers in his family line, Bertie Matthews, the owner of Matthews Mill in Shipston-under-Wychwood.
The male heirs of the mill line the room in large portraits, terminating at an eight-foot poster of the regenerative model that Mr Matthews has forged as a blueprint for the future of his mill. If I was expecting a crusty, dusty, figure in overalls, I could not be more mistaken. Bertie Matthews has the demeanour and charm of a public-school graduate on a work placement.
As I gesture to the fine portraits, he’s quick to point out, your boss is not the last but the next generation. In his case, two infant daughters, who he blames for the chesty cough that he’s trying to speak through in introducing himself.
“No one knows what to expect on a visit here. People think of a watermill,” he laughs. “They think of huge stones grinding round, and donkeys. Or they imagine one of the massive industrial mills. We’re somewhere in between.”
That “somewhere in between” captures not only the physical character of the eighth-generation family business but also its place within the British flour milling industry. Too large to be an artisan mill, yet too small to compete with the commodity giants. Matthews Cotswold Flour occupies a space few others do – and Bertie Matthews believes that increasingly gives the company an advantage.
At the tender age of 35, Mr Matthews has become one of the most outspoken younger voices in British milling. While many in the industry are focused on efficiency, consolidation and commodity markets, his attention is fixed somewhere else entirely: soil health, grain procurement, domestic food security and, crucially, what the British milling industry might look like 20 years from now.
He talks quickly, joining together economics, agronomy and baking science with the enthusiasm of someone who genuinely enjoys connecting apparently unrelated ideas, and a degree of compounded knowledge that can only come from over 200 years of legacy. Almost every answer comes back to one phrase: “the long game.”
“My daughter keeps asking me how old I am,” he says, laughing. “She’s just worked out the idea of age. I’m 35, so hopefully I’ve got a good amount of time, if I look after myself, to play a bit of a long game.”
That perspective shapes almost everything he says.
Artisanal ambition
Ask Mr Matthews about the health of the UK milling industry and, despite the well-televised negativity across UK agriculture, his answer is unexpectedly upbeat.
“I think the UK as a whole is in a very strong position,” he says. “Really, there’s about 10 national flour millers. Four big ones, four medium-sized ones and four small ones. Then below that you’ve got your stone mills and watermills attached to bakeries or farms. But real national flour mills – there’s about 10.”
Matthews, he says, belongs to the last group. “We’re the smallest of the small bunch – which we’re not bothered by at all.”
There is no trace of defensiveness in the remark. On the contrary, he regards the company’s size as liberating – there’s plenty of confidence. Matthews’ flour is now one of the top artisan flour brands nationally, having recently achieved year-on-year sales growth of nearly 20 percent and expanded into 26 percent more Tesco stores.
With smart marketing and slick branding, Matthews has tapped into the zeitgeist – the growing craft bakery and home baking market. Their recently introduced Regenerative Artisan T65 Bread Flour, a premium 11.5 percent protein bread flour milled in the Cotswolds from 100 percent British regenerative wheat, is aimed squarely at the thriving sourdough market.
Meanwhile, he explains, across the sector, mills continue to invest heavily in new capacity. Larger sites become larger still, while fewer operators handle greater volumes. It is the familiar story of consolidation seen across much of British food manufacturing.
“Mills are getting bigger,” he says. “There might be fewer of them, but they’re getting bigger. Wright’s have built a new mill. Whitworths have built a new mill. Bradshaws have invested. So, there’s investment in the industry and that’s positive.”
He sees little value in lamenting consolidation. Instead, he points to another trend happening at the opposite end of the market.
“There are more and more little stone mills popping up all the time. I actually think that’s fantastic because it gives people an appreciation of flour milling. That it isn’t easy! It localises the food system and gets people back in touch with where their food comes from.”
For Mr Matthews, these apparently contradictory trends – industrial consolidation and artisan revival – comfortably coexist. His own business goals sit comfortably between them.
Secure supply chains
But while Mr Matthews is optimistic about milling, he believes the industry’s greatest opportunity lies in changing how millers think about grain buying.
“The success and failure of a milling business,” he maintains emphatically, “is down to its grain buying strategy.”
That statement becomes the thread running through the rest of our conversation. Most people, he suggests, imagine milling begins once the wheat arrives at the factory. He argues it begins years earlier, in conversations with farmers. Farmers, he says, are looking for ways to survive.
“Financial sustainability is the number one sustainability metric for a farmer.” He repeats the point several times. “If a farmer can’t make any money, none of the rest of it matters.”
Nitrogen prices illustrate the problem perfectly. To produce Group 1 milling wheat, growers typically need relatively high nitrogen inputs. Yet nitrogen is both expensive and internationally traded.
“If somebody bombs a couple of containers in the Strait of Hormuz,” Mr Matthews says matter-of-factly, “the price goes up. Suddenly the farmer’s asking, ‘Am I actually going to make enough margin growing Group 1?’ So, our job as millers is to understand the farmer’s profit and loss and ensure we’re offering contracts that genuinely incentivise them to grow milling wheat.”
Large commodity millers, he acknowledges, often cannot do that. “When you’re producing hundreds of thousands of tonnes a year on one or two percent net margin, it’s very difficult. That’s the big boy’s game. We’re not really playing that game – because we can’t.”
Instead, Matthews Cotswold Flour has built a customer base of retailers, independent bakeries and specialist food producers, giving it more flexibility than businesses tied tightly to commodity flour markets.
“Our margins are slightly higher because our products are more specialist,” he explains. “That gives us the room to build these systems.”
Those systems, he believes, depend upon something many supply chains have lost: relationships.
“We’re in this together,” he says. “We’re in it with the farmer. We’re in it with the baker. We’re in it with the food producer. We have to understand what each of us is going through.”
He is not suggesting farmers should be protected from commercial reality. Quite the opposite.
“It’s always going to be a gamble,” he says. “So, take a calculated risk.”
Acknowledging a justifiably hard-baked gloominess in UK farming at the moment, he sketches out the kind of conversation he wants to have with growers.
“You can grow feed wheat and you’re completely exposed to the global market. Or you can grow Group 1 and worry about nitrogen prices. If you look at it like that, you’d never do anything. So what we’re trying to do is give farmers more options.”
Instead of 600 acres of feed wheat, perhaps the farm grows 200 acres of feed, 200 of Group 1, 100 of rye and 100 of spelt.
“Our objective is really simple. If someone works with us for five years, I want them to stand up in front of all their neighbours and say, ‘The products I sell into Matthews are now my highest-margin products.’ It won’t transform the whole farm overnight,” he says. “But it’ll reduce risk and increase options.”
Rethinking protein
But what about the inevitably lower protein: if farmers are encouraged to reduce nitrogen inputs as part of regenerative farming, what happens when protein levels drop below what millers have traditionally demanded?
Mr Matthews believes the industry has become too fixated on a single number.
“People get very hung up on protein. It’s not the top quality metric!”
He pauses before explaining why. “What we’re actually interested in is gluten quality. You can have a really high-protein wheat that’s hopeless. Equally, you can have a lower-protein wheat with fantastic gluten characteristics that performs brilliantly,” he explains. “You can bake a perfectly good loaf of bread with 12.5 percent protein.”
It is a distinction that often disappears outside technical milling circles. Protein percentage is easy to measure, easy to specify and easy to trade. Gluten functionality is considerably more complex, influenced not only by genetics but by soil biology, weather, nutrition and crop management throughout the growing season.
“What creates good gluten?” Mr Matthews asks rhetorically. “Everything. It starts with the soil. It starts with the weather. It starts with water. It starts with nutrition. It’s the whole system.”
His fundamental belief is that this good gluten is achieved by restoring soil health through regenerative farming. Ultimately, he says, customers are not buying protein. “They’re buying consistency.”
A commercial baker needs dough that behaves exactly the same today as it did last week. Pizza manufacturers demand extensibility. Plant bakers want strength and tolerance. Cake manufacturers need almost the opposite. The challenge is not simply producing flour. It is producing precisely the same flour every day of the year despite every harvest being different.
“That’s what milling is. It’s taking all these different wheats and creating consistency.” That, after all, is the miller’s job, Mr Matthews says.
A different way of buying grain
For Mr Matthews, the conversation about regenerative agriculture always comes back to grain buying.
“The success and failure of a milling business is down to its grain buying strategy,” he says, smiling for emphasis.
It’s a deceptively simple statement, but one that runs through almost every decision Matthews Cotswold Flour makes. There’s an assumption a miller’s job begins when the wheat arrives at the intake screw. Mr Matthews argues it starts months – sometimes years – earlier, around the kitchen table with the farmer.
“Financial sustainability is the number one sustainability metric for a farmer,” he says. “If the farmer isn’t making money, none of the rest of it works.”
That means understanding far more than protein specifications or Hagberg numbers. It means understanding fertiliser invoices, weather risk, rotations and cashflow. Take Group 1 milling wheat. Achieving 13 percent protein often demands significant nitrogen inputs, yet nitrogen prices have become increasingly volatile.
“If somebody bombs a couple of ships in the Strait of Hormuz, the price of fertiliser goes through the roof. Suddenly the farmer’s asking, am I actually going to make enough margin growing Group 1 this year? So our job is to understand the farmer’s profit and loss account and offer contracts that genuinely incentivise them to grow milling wheat.”
He contrasts that with the reality of the commodity market. “The traditional big mill approach is, ‘Sorry, you’ve only achieved 12.2 instead of 13. We’ll either discount it or reject it.'”
Matthews’ humour
“It’s so funny. Sometimes I think we should be … too. But no – that defeats the point.”
The remark hangs in the air because it captures the pressure every independent mill faces. It would undoubtedly be easier to enforce rigid specifications and pass the risk back to the farm. That is, after all, how commodity markets work. Matthews has deliberately chosen another path. It’s clear enough, he explains: “If the farm doesn’t financially survive, you’re back to square one. We’ve built a relationship, we’ve built a way of working, and then you’ve got to start all over again. So why wouldn’t you want the farmer to make money?
“If a regenerative farmer has reduced nitrogen because that’s what we’re asking them to do, then we can’t turn round and say, ‘Sorry, you haven’t hit exactly the same protein specification.’ We’ve got to think differently.”
Instead, the company develops blending strategies that begin with flour functionality rather than a single protein number. “We’re not selling protein,” he says. “We’re selling consistency.”
That distinction changes the conversation completely. Instead of asking, “Has this crop reached 13 percent?”, Mr Matthews asks whether it can contribute to a blend that consistently delivers the dough performance the customer expects.
“The baker doesn’t buy protein,” he says. “They buy flour that behaves exactly the same every single day.”
For Matthews, that flexibility is one of the advantages of being an independent mill.
“We’re not playing the big boy game,” he says. “We can’t! But what we can do is build relationships.”
His ambition is that those relationships become commercially valuable for everyone involved.
“Our objective is really simple. If somebody has worked with us for five years, I want them to stand up in front of their neighbours and say, ‘The products I sell into Matthews are now my highest-margin products.’ If we can achieve that, then we’ve done our job.”
Measuring not marketing
As a term that’s been criticised by several agricultural organisations across the EU and UK as ‘greenwashing’, Mr Matthews sighs with a hint of exasperation when the conversation turns to regenerative agriculture. Not because he doubts it but because he knows the term is becoming fashionable before it becomes meaningful.
“Everything should be criticised,” he says. “I think that’s healthy.”
But he has little interest in broad sustainability claims unsupported by evidence. “I’m an engineer by background, I want data,” he says.
For Matthews, regenerative farming has to be judged against measurable outcomes rather than aspirations. He describes five objectives that underpin the company’s approach: “Soil health, carbon sequestration, biodiversity, water and food security.”
The final category catches many people by surprise. “I don’t hear many people talking about food security as part of regeneration,” he says. “But if we’re not producing food security, what are we actually trying to achieve?”
That principle shapes the company’s own verification programme. Rather than asking growers simply to declare themselves regenerative, participating farms are independently assessed against a range of measurable criteria covering soil condition, carbon, biodiversity, water management and cropping systems.
“You’ve got to measure it,” he says simply. “Otherwise, regenerative risks becoming little more than another marketing label and hope isn’t a strategy.”
The case for British-grown wheat
The discussion eventually returns to a question that clearly occupies his thinking. Why does Britain still rely so heavily on imported high-protein wheat?
“We absolutely can produce enough flour in this country,” he says. “The question is whether we can produce enough of the right wheat.”
Historically, imported Canadian spring wheats have provided the protein and dough strength needed to blend with British crops. Mr Matthews accepts that reality but simply wonders whether the balance could change.
“What if we started growing more high-protein red wheats?”
Traditionally, many of those varieties have been overlooked because they yield less than mainstream commercial wheats. “But yield isn’t everything. If a red wheat yields less but requires fewer inputs, and if the premium reflects that, then suddenly the margin per hectare looks very different.”
It is another example of him asking the industry to reconsider long-established assumptions. Too often, he suggests, conversations focus on tonnes per hectare rather than pounds per hectare.
“The farmer doesn’t bank yield,” he says. “They bank margin.”
Thinking beyond the next harvest
There’s a temptation to describe Matthews’ approach as optimistic. He disagrees. “I don’t think it’s optimism. It’s just trying to stack the odds slightly more in your favour.”
No farming system removes uncertainty. Weather remains unpredictable. Markets remain volatile. Politics continues to reshape agricultural policy.
“It’s always going to be a gamble. If we can improve soil health, reduce inputs, give farmers more cropping options, improve margins and build better long-term relationships, then hopefully everyone’s in a stronger position. Not hopefully,” he corrects himself with jovial certainty. “We’ll know. We’ll measure it!”
That insistence on evidence runs through everything Mr Matthews says. Whether discussing regenerative farming, flour quality or food security, he returns repeatedly to the same principle.
“If we’re right, the data will show it. If we’re wrong, the data will show that too.”
For an industry built on laboratory analysis, blending accuracy and process control, it is an appropriately miller’s answer.
Working for the next generation
Towards the end of our conversation, Mr Matthews returns to the theme with which he began. Family businesses, he believes, think differently because they answer to different shareholders.
“The people you really work for,” he says quietly, “are the ones coming after you.”
It is perhaps the simplest explanation of everything Matthews Cotswold Flour is trying to achieve. An eighth-generation independent mill cannot outspend Britain’s commodity giants. It cannot outproduce them and has no desire to. Instead, it is betting that relationships, careful grain procurement, measurable regeneration and a longer investment horizon will prove equally valuable competitive advantages.
Whether that strategy ultimately reshapes British flour milling remains to be seen. But in Shipston-on-Stour, Bertie Matthews is already planning beyond the next harvest. He is planning for the next generation.
And in an industry increasingly driven by quarterly performance and global commodity markets, that may be the boldest strategy of all.
Whether Bertie Matthews proves correct remains to be seen, but unlike many sustainability visions, his comes with measurable targets and a willingness to be judged against them.