Ask Annie what's behind ten years of Baboo, and she'll talk about ingredients before anything else. Not as a tagline — as the actual reason the gelato tastes the way it does. Here are some of the people who make it possible.
The milk
Baboo's organic milk comes from Eastfield Farm in North Perrott, Somerset — a small herd where every cow has a name and is milked by robots rather than to a schedule. The cows decide when they want to be milked, and the system knows exactly how much each one produces, so they're never over-milked or stressed. Calmer cows, better milk. It's a wonderful place, and it shows in everything we make.
The fruit
Locally, the fruit comes from farms like Elwell Fruit Farm and North Perrott Fruit Farm. The rhubarb travels a little further — a whole pallet sent down from the famous Yorkshire rhubarb triangle, those delicate, forced pink stems that make our rhubarb sorbet and the Rhubarb & Custard that became one of our most popular Annie's Specials.
The relationships often run both ways. With Forde Abbey, we buy their fruit and they buy our ice cream — the kind of reciprocal, local partnership that makes us feel genuinely part of the community.
The finishing touches
Some ingredients are sought out further afield. Each year we visit an ice cream fair in Italy, where small farm producers sell the best nuts, vanilla and more that you'll find anywhere in the world. And sometimes the best discovery is right on the doorstep — like the Baklava made by a family in Yeovil, Somerset that recently inspired Annie's Specials Yoghurt & Walnut Baklava gelato.
That's how the flavours usually happen: not from a plan, but from an ingredient so good it demands to be made into gelato.
And the coffee
Even the coffee in our kiosks has a story. When we opened in Lyme Regis, the whole team spent a training day learning to pull the perfect cappuccino from Giles Read of Reads's Coffee in Sherborne — concentrating hard, by all accounts, until the coffee was genuinely good.
Ten years of doing it this way, and we wouldn't change a thing.