The latest in Channel 4’s portfolio of reality shows, Aldi’s Next Big Thing sees a range of new and emerging food and drink businesses pitch their new ideas to the grocer, bidding to be included on the shelves of one of Britain’s biggest supermarkets. Charlie Fermor, Co-founder, Freddie’s Farm, says: “ It’s just been such a long time getting to this point. I started the journey as a student studying agriculture at Reading University. I took such a risk when I invested in our unique dehydrating machine. Then with the pandemic happening just as business was taking off, at one point we thought we’d never get here. Actually during the show we’d convinced ourselves we hadn’t won, but when Julie announced our name it was crazy. We can’t be happier, and it was so exciting to tell the kids – we can’t wait to get them down to an Aldi store to see it on shelf now!”

If you’ve missed it, Channel 4’s latest reality TV show‘Aldi’s Next Big Thing’ has been championing a wide range of new food and drink brands over recent weeks. Laurie Fermor, Co-Founder of Freddie’s Farm, which also employs two factory staff, said: “Our business idea, inspired by our taster-in-chief Freddie and now his baby sister Ottie, has come a long way in a short space of time, and recognition from a name like Aldi marks the latest exciting milestone for us.We need to look at ways to make everything more efficient – and to meet our ever-increasing demand,” she said. Charlie Fermor is a fourth-generation, multi-British Farming Awards-winning farmer, and his patented process of preserving the bond between natural sugar and fibre in preparing the products is key to them providing children with the best possible nutrition. All of Freddie’s Farm’s products are made with 100% British fruit and veg. The drying process has been perfected over a long time so it’s quite special. We try to keep the flavours you get in raw fruit and veg,” Laurie said.

Now, for Laurie, the focus is on “trying to harness the current success and keep momentum going. We want to keep growing the business and we’ve got big decisions to make as to how we scale up.” As the couple are making all their produce from their farm in Kent, the ongoing cost-of-living and energy crisis is making it increasingly expensive to keep operations up and running. We run a number of differenttraining courses related to sheep, sheep dogs and general sheep management. Being on the show has hugely increased our visibility on the market, so we’re not complaining at all! It was such an amazing opportunity and even more mind-blowing to win. Everybody’s products were amazing and deserved a place on the shelves, and we had totally convinced ourselves that we had lost,” said Laurie, adding that they were up against some “seriously stiff competition”.

Sign up and find out why our readers call our newsletter the most influential in Business. Get the UK's leading business content straight to your inbox every week. We offer Sheepdog training and experience days. We have dogs of all ages and experience which will often work for anyone as well as having different sheep in different environments. It was quite an experience filming the show. Very stressful, but definitely worth it,” Laurie Fermor told Grocery Gazette.

As a result, we have lower free sugars, which help prevent kids getting sugar highs and crashes, which we certainly like to avoid with our two at all costs!” Soaring demand and sales boost Husband and wife, Charlie and Laurie beat hundreds of other hopefuls to land contract of a lifetimeNow the fledgling business has fought off competition from hundreds of other hopefuls to be named Aldi’s Next Big Thing and landed a contract with the national supermarket chain, as televised on the Channel 4 series in November. Co-founder and co-director of Freddie’s Farm, Laurie Fermor, takes Grocery Gazette behind the scenes of the prime time show and shares what happened after the cameras stopped rolling.