In order that you can be sure that all of your box comes from Kent, here are our suppliers. You'll also see that we only buy direct from the grower. We do not use distributors. This is because distributed veg tends to come from London, and has usually been in cold storage for a number of days. Our veg comes direct from the field, and is therefore fresh as a daisy - an edible one of course! We also stay away from intensive, large scale farmers who produce for the supermarkets. We tend to find that the intensive method uses too many chemicals for us.

Our Major Suppliers are:

R.G. Ovenden

Dickie Ovenden runs a great farm near Sandwich. He owns several parcels of land and has been farming there for some time.... He also acts as co-ordinator for several smaller growers in the area, who tend to grow specialist crops, and we collect all their produce from him. It is all picked to order, nothing left in cold storage for more than a day. Whilst not organic, Dickie does not use sprays on his crops. He describes his growing as 'natural'. We can vouch for that. We have visited his fields and are pleased to report plenty of hedges and weed growth. You'll even get the odd slug or nibble on his crops just to show that the soil is not devoid of life and poisioned.

Dickie supplies some fruit & veg to Howletts zoo park. Not the seconds mind. The gorillas throw the food back if it isn't fresh. We are proud to announce that the food you eat has been tested on animals!

Dickie also acts as a hub for us for all the local producers in the area. So whether it is raspberries or watercress we can get Dickie to get it for us, nice and fresh direct form the producer. That saves us making loads of calls to different producers.

Keepers Nursery

Monkshill Farm

Monkshill Farm is situated on the north Kent coast overlooking the estuary and the beautiful countryside between Faversham and Whitstable. The Royal School for Deaf Children Margate and Westgate College for Deaf People purchased the 65 acre site in 1995. They have have worked hard over the years to develop it into a successful working farm with a strong educational focus.

We source all of our chicken, beef and lamb from the farm, as well as geese at Christmas. All of the animals are free range and live outdoors.

The farm uses a small local abbatoir and the butchery takes place on site The beef is hung for 3 weeks before butchery.

Roundwood Orchard Pig Company

Bev & Chris are producing the most wonderful free range park for us from their farm near Meopham for 19 years. Below is an extract from their webite:

"We are very passionate about our animals and our main priority is giving them a good quality of life.  All our pigs are kept outdoors, the sows are allowed to farrow in theIr own arks. The piglets usually start to come out of the arks within the first 24 hours, our view is not to interfere unless it is absolutely necessary.  Even our 2 boars Reuben and Fred are in outdoor pens.

We have been fortunate enough to keep our pigs on our neighbours farm since 2000.   The Tobutt family produce seasonal apples, pears and seasonal soft fruits. The pigs are fed all the fallen fruit from the farm which we feel adds to the superb taste of our meat.

Our main breeding sows are pedigree Saddlebacks and Oxford Sandy and Blacks, Seth is our Large White boar, we have found by cross breeding the sows with Seth the meat is leaner.

More info at http://www.candbmeats.co.uk/701.html