To satisfy Britain’s appetite for mince pies and Christmas puddings, Arla Foods UK, the farmer-owned dairy company, produced and sent out nearly five times more cream than average in the week running up to Christmas, adding up to over 6 million pots.
As the UK’s largest cream producer, supplying the majority of retailers, Arla’s fresh cream production increased from an average of 1.32 million pots a week to a staggering 6.27 million last week as households began getting ready for Christmas. This was in addition to the record-breaking 4.4 million pots of seasonal alcohol and flavoured cream that were produced for this festive season.
Most of the production took place at Arla’s Stourton (Leeds) and Oakthorpe (London) sites, with teams at two other sites on stand-by to give additional support as required, as consumers whipped up a host of festive recipes.
As well as the traditional brandy cream, the festive Christmas cream season now brings everything from ‘Champagne Cocktail’, ‘Channel Island Clementine’ to ‘Cointreau Cream’.
The flavours are extensively researched and developed by Arla’s new product development teams who spend a year engaging with and combing through retail, customer and market insight to anticipate and respond to consumer trends. This year’s favourites included winter warmers such as ‘toffee & pecan’, ‘gingerbread,’ and ‘stem ginger.’
Tomas Pietrangeli, managing director Arla Foods UK, said:
“Cream and Christmas creams are a festive dinner staple, and our sites do an impressive job of scaling up to meet the significantly increased demand for fresh cream in the holiday season.
“And, of course, cows don’t stop producing milk at Christmas so we have tankers on Christmas day collecting milk from our farmers, enough to fill over 1.2 million glasses!”