The Estate Dairy was founded in 2016 by Shaun and Rebecca Young, a husband-and-wife team. Shaun came from speciality coffee, Rebecca from a dairy farming family. They still own and run the business today.
Our base is on the Cholmondeley Estate in Cheshire, where our cultured butter and Greek-style yoghurt are made. Our milk and cream come from a small group of partner farms.
Yes. Shaun and Rebecca Young are co-founders. Rebecca’s brother Andrew runs butter production. The wider team is now around eighty people.
Cultured butter is butter made from cream or crème fraîche that has been fermented with live cultures before churning. The result is a butter with deeper, more complex flavour than standard sweet-cream butter. We slow-culture ours at our Cheshire dairy.
Most British supermarket butter is sweet-cream butter. It’s made from fresh cream and churned quickly. Cultured butter starts with cream that’s been fermented, which develops yogurty, slightly tangy, almost cheese-like notes. It’s how butter has traditionally been made across much of Europe.
It’s Greek-style yogurt. The term “Greek yogurt” is protected in the UK and only applies to yogurt made in Greece. Ours is made in Cheshire from British milk, using a thick strained method that gives Greek yogurt its character.
Our butter contains only Milk, crème fraîche, and live cultures. No starches, no thickeners, no stabilisers, no added sugar. Our salted butter contains sea salt.
Our Greek-style Yogurt contains only Milk and live cultures.
Yes. Our butter, yogurt, milk, cream and cottage Cheese are all vegetarian.
Refer to the use-by date on the pack. Once opened, products are best kept refrigerated and used within the time stated on the label.
From a small group of partner farms in Cheshire and the surrounding areas. We work with each farm directly and choose them on the basis of traditional methods, well-cared-for cattle, and a focus on milk quality over volume.
Yes. Our partner farms do not use Bovaer or any other methane-suppressing feed additive. It’s an active choice we’ve made.
Bovaer is a synthetic feed additive that reduces the methane cattle produce. It has been approved for use in the UK and EU. We’ve chosen not to use it.
We don’t currently hold organic certification as a business. Some of the farms we work with are organically certified, while others work to very similar standards without formally paying for certification.
All of our 1 litre milk is organic.
The standards we hold our partner farms to overlap with much of what organic certification covers, but we’ve prioritised B Corp certification, which audits the whole business, over organic certification, which only audits the milk.
Yes. All our products are pasteurised. Pasteurisation is a brief heat treatment that kills harmful bacteria, and it’s required for almost all dairy sold in the UK. Our milk is pasteurised before we culture it.
Unhomogenised milk is milk that hasn’t been processed to disperse its fat. Most supermarket milk is homogenised.
Unhomogenised milk leaves the cream intact, so it naturally rises to the top of the bottle, the way milk traditionally has done. Many people find it richer and rounder on the palate. Shake before pouring.
Our milk is unhomogenised.
The dairy is a working production site rather than a visitor destination, so we’re not currently open for general visits. If you’re a wholesale customer or a member of the trade and would like to learn more about what we do, please get in touch through our wholesale page
Yes. The Estate Dairy is a certified B Corp, one of only five family-run dairies in the UK to hold the certification.
We were the first UK dairy to put a large-format dairy product into retail glass, in partnership with M&S. Glass is heavier and harder to ship than plastic, but it doesn’t shed microplastics into food, it recycles cleanly. We’ve taken the trade-off.
Our refillable kegs are containers we supply to chefs and food service customers. We collect the empties, sanitise them, and refill them, which removes a great deal of single-use plastic from the food service supply chain. We pioneered the format in the UK with the help of The Udder Way.
At a number of independent delis, farm shops, and food halls across the UK. As well as Sainsbury’s, Waitrose and Ocado. Visit our store locator to learn more.
No. You can buy our products directly through Ocado.