Callestick, a Family Farm Run by Two Brothers

Sam Agricultural Director – I manage our herd of 380+ cows over almost a 1,000 acres of farm land. Keeping them happy is important to them producing the best quality milk – our raw product.

Ben Operations Director - I oversee the collection of the milk that is just 1000 metres away from us, through to delivering to customers across Cornwall and further afield - we go as far as China.

Our mum, Angela ran our Sales and Marketing for 28 years, in fact she did more or less everything for the first few years.
 
As things grew, our grandfather Simon and dad Sebastian got involved, dad says he never wants to retire. As we have grown our team has expanded to keep up with demand for our premium product.

We milk our herd once a day, at the crack of dawn. The milk then gets transported to our factory to start the ice cream making process. We add sugar, cream, give it a good mix and then pasteurise it. It is then cooled and sat to age for generally 12-18 hours before it is then made into ice cream. 

To make our mix into ice cream you whip it whilst freezing, because if you just froze the mix it would have the texture of a lump of ice!

The inclusions are then added after the freezing process, such as the blackcurrant, fudge pieces, etc. The ice cream is then filled into one of our range of 7 pack sizes.

Here at Callestick, we like to keep things as local as possible. Our Clotted Cream comes from the famous Rodda's creamery and our Sea Salt from the Cornish Sea Salt Company further down in Cornwall. Even the water used for our sorbets comes from our farms own natural spring. Anything we purchase from out of county and beyond has to be of the highest quality. 

Ice cream is synonymous with Italy, so you'd be hard pushed to make ice cream and not have something from Italy involved in the process, whether that's machinery or packaging, or some ingredients and flavours such as pistachios.
 
Our pistachio, is a national award winner, a Great Taste Award winner and that's Italian pistachio paste that we use because we consider it the best.
 

We have won The Chefs Choice award for our Premier Vanilla. Organised by bid food, the awards ceremony took place at The Shard in London and it was a great evening!

The fountain in our courtyard was actually a cattle drinking trough.  Our grandparents used to milk the cows in the building which now houses our tea room, and our herd would have come into the courtyard area, ready to be taken back to the fields.

We know that as well as looking after the herd, thus making brilliant quality milk, we always only buy in the finest fruits and confectionary to be added to our ice cream. We are not in business to make a cheap product that doesn't stand up to our standards. The taste of Cornwall is one of indulgence.

Even from the early days, people would come and see the ice cream being made. To this day, our viewing gallery gives people the chance to see all flavours being created and packaged so you can look through the window and see products being made.
 
Obviously this year, many things have had to change and because of the way our viewing gallery has been built, social distancing would be impossible. When we get through this we will be able to open up the viewing area again and people will be able to see our product being made once more.