Established at its new premises only in 2024, Loddington Farm Shop has already won a Kent Independent Retailer of the Year award and been featured in The Times’ ’35 Best Farm Shops in Britain’.

Loddington Farm is run by James Smith, a fifth-generation fruit farmer passionate about sustainable agriculture, farming with nature and regenerating the land. The farm shop acts as a window to these values for the local community – demonstrating to our customers the importance of food provenance and production. We even have a 360-degree artist’s mural covering our walls that depicts our journey towards regeneration.

Every we year we host thousands of guests, whether that’s during Open Farm Sunday, our annual Wassail, during our PYO seasons or on our summer evening farm tours. We run educational workshops for local schools and agricultural societies and are part of the Greensand Ridge Farmer Cluster – helping to make more farmland work for wildlife as well as food production.

In the farm shop, we supply as much of our own fresh produce from the farm as we can (namely apples, pears, apricots, asparagus, pumpkins, cob nuts, walnuts and cherries), as well as selling our own eggs, pork, organic cut flowers (from Blooming Green on site), coffee beans (from Kampa Coffee on site) and Great Taste award-winning Owlet Fruit Juice (using surplus fruit that is pressed and bottled on-site). Our ambition is to be our own biggest supplier, but until that is possible, we work with a number of local, carefully selected suppliers in order to champion the best food and drink that Kent has to offer.

Our manager, Richard, is a third-generation greengrocer and a real fruit and veg expert! With decades of experience, he knows how to select the best produce and is always on hand to offer advice or recommendations to our customers.

Our friendly and dedicated team are passionate about promoting the farm’s wider message of sustainability, and we regularly get them in to their wellies and out on to the farm to build their knowledge on regenerative farming principles.

We host regular tasting events with our local suppliers, as well as farm tours and PYO events so that our customers can see ‘behind-the-scenes’. We also host regular community events – hog roasts, live music, family fun days and harvest festivals – all with the underlying goal of bringing people closer to the food they eat and getting to know their local farmer.

We have a weekly, local fishmonger on Thursdays, and have recently refurbished our coffee shop from a marquee to a lovely wooden cabin that is decorated with seasonal, organic flowers from Blooming Green, and serves hot drinks and freshly prepared food seven days a week.