Little Mill Natural Products
“We are Andrea & Jake Steel, and we have been running Little Mill Natural Products since 2012. We manufacture and sell homemade jams, chutneys, marmalades and jellies, along with homemade cordials and our ever-popular fruit pies& Bara Brith - all without chemicals and preservatives.
Produced in a former Water Mill in the village of Little Mill in the valley of the river Usk, South East Wales, all of our products are based on traditional recipes and made only from ingredients found in nature. We also provide some which were devised by ourselves and not to be found elsewhere – for example Rum and Blackcurrant Jam, Calvados and Crab Apple Jelly (when in season) , Elderflower and Gooseberry Jelly.
We produce more than 10 different jams, 5 marmalades, many chutneys and jellies as well as specialities such as piccalilli, lemon curd and quince cheese. We also make three different homemade cordials – elderflower, raspberry, and blackcurrant and provide pure apple juice from several different individual apple varieties grown and pressed in an orchard in the Brecon Beacons.
From the oven, we make traditional Welsh farmhouse fruit loaf (Bara Brith) and three different fruit pies made from original ingredients - Apple, Blackberry and Apple, and Blackcurrant and Apple. Some of our customers also tell us we make the best Bara Brith they’ve ever tasted!
We have been trading with Cardiff Farmers Markets since the very beginning and did our first market in June 2012; we now trade at Rhiwbina, Roath and Riverside markets every week, and Pontcanna market which was also founded by Cardiff Farmers Markets.
We are based in a really good soft fruit growing area in South East Wales which we tap into, and lots of our customers also bring us their own produce which we turn into products too. For example, we have been brought rhubarb, marrows, apples, apricots, gooseberries, blackcurrants – anything our customers have in excess. When we’ve turned this into something delicious, the customers take away as much as they like, and we keep the rest – it’s a trust-based system that has always worked for us.
We also bring at least five (sometimes up to seven) local raw honeys to the markets - pure Welsh honeys made from flowers from the countryside, local hills and the coast; because we do markets all over South Wales, our customers want access to honey which is truly local to them. One of our honey suppliers is 86 years old, has been keeping bees since he was a teenager and now only sells his honeys through us, just a few jars for each market. This honey, like all of the others, is special and distinctive.
Our favourite part of trading at Cardiff Farmers Markets is meeting people from all walks of life and making those personal relationships with customers, traders and our suppliers. Ours is a business built on trust – during lockdown we worked all the way through and would even deliver to customers' homes directly and those relationships are still going strong today.
We are strong believers in the future of our planet, and do our little bit by re-cycling and re-using wherever possible. We provide 35p for each of our jars and bottles which are returned and £1 for each tub.”