Louise Harding's Contact Details

Louise Harding's Company Details

The British Quinoa Company

Hordley, England, United Kingdom • 5 Employees
Food Production

Our company started back in 2006, when Stephen read a magazine article about the fantastic nutritional properties of quinoa, leading him to buy a small amount to try the product. Fortunately, he loved it, but it got him thinking.... wouldn't it be great if we could produce British grown quinoa on the family farm? And so, the experiment began! Initially, we planted several types of quinoa from off the supermarket shelf, but without much success as the seeds would either fail to germinate or the plants wouldn't mature in the field. We moved on to trying a vast array of other quinoa varieties, from bird seed to small packets of garden seed, again without much success as the quality of the harvested seed was very poor. Our breakthrough came when we were lucky enough to get the opportunity to trial some new quinoa varieties that have been bred for our European climate... and they were fantastic! The new varieties produced a high quality quinoa sample with nice big white grains, and they successfully matured in our British climate allowing us to harvest the crop. We now have the exclusive UK licence to these new quinoa varieties and have built our business up around them. Having the correct varieties was a major breakthrough; however it still left the question of... how we actually grow the stuff? Well, several years on and we've cracked it! It's taken many field experiments to teach us how to successfully establish a crop, control weeds and harvest a high quality product. We have had many hard lessons along the way to get to where we are now, but with each passing season we've certainly learnt how to grow a great crop of British quinoa!