A leading Welsh food wholesaler has added two award-winning ice-cream makers to its roster of top quality products.

Harlech Foodservice is to distribute Gwent-based Sidoli’s which joins Cheshire Farm Ice Cream as part of its popular range.

The two agreements will open up the whole of the Wales and border counties markets to the two brands, both family firms with Sidoli’s tracing its beginnings back to 1922 when Italian immigrant Benedetto Sidoli started making vanilla ice-cream at his café in Ebbw Vale.

Cheshire Farm Ice Cream was founded in 1986 when dairy farmers Tom and Margaret Fell diversified into ice cream by setting up an ice-cream shop on their tenant farm on the Bolesworth Estate, near Chester.

The two businesses have stayed in the same families with Sidoli’s now headed by Benedetto’s great-grandson Stefano while Cheshire Farm’s ice-cream manufacture and wholesale sector is led by one of the founders’ sons, Graeme.

Both have gone from strength to strength and see their partnerships with fellow-family firm Harlech, one of the UK’s fastest-growing food distribution companies, as a logical step in their evolution.

Chris Gregson, Head of Sales at Harlech, based near Criccieth and with branches in Chester, Telford, Merthyr Tydfil and Carmarthen, said: “These are quality products which will increase the choice for our customers and at the same time open up new markets for Sidoli and Cheshire Farm.

“We see strong potential for both with Sidoli having a name for quality in South East Wales and Cheshire Farm a well-known brand in the North West and North Wales and we are confident we will be able to bring them to a much wider market in the future.

“We began our partnership with Cheshire Farm last year and in the first ten months have added 153 new stockists of their range of 50-plus flavours of real dairy ice cream, sorbets and plant based ice cream and expect sales to rise to over 65,000 litres this year.”

Cheshire Farm produce up to 10,000 litres of ice cream a day which still comes from 500 plus Friesian cows grazing in the surrounding fields on the Bolesworth Estate, at Tattenhall.

Ed Warrington, Wholesale Manager for Cheshire Farm Ice Cream, said: “It takes us 24 hours to pick up the milk from the local milking parlour, pasteurise it and turn it into ice cream.

“We have been supplying ice cream parlours, pubs, restaurants and hotels for over 30 years via our own fleet of temperature controlled vehicles and then Harlech called us to talk about a partnership and it made perfect sense.

“Getting our products onto Harlech’s wheels has opened up much bigger markets as they supply to a much wider area taking in all of Wales, the North West and the West Midlands.”

Multi award-winning Sidoli’s is one of Wales’s iconic brands and is now headed by Stefano, the fourth generation of the family who came from Bardi in north-west Italy.

He said: “It’s a real opportunity for us to market our ice cream across the whole of Wales, particularly in the north and the west and south west as Harlech have distribution centres across the country.

“It’s an opportunity for us to reach completely new markets and to do it with a company that is very like us, a family business with the same core values.

“It’s a very exciting prospect to work alongside a company of their size and with their resources.”

Harlech’s expansion over the past three years has seen their sales increase from £32 million to a record turnover of around £50 million with profit at an all-time high of more than £2 million.

They have a core customer base in the tourism and hospitality sectors which aligns perfectly with that of Sidoli’s and Cheshire Farm Ice Cream and Harlech Managing Director David Cattrall said: “We’re having a record year for sales and a record year for profit even though we are reinvesting heavily in making the business fit for the future and making sure our prices are aggressively competitive.

Their current £6 million expansion plan, announced last year, has enabled the company to create 75 jobs with that number expected to double this year while it has also opened depots in Telford and in Merthyr Tydfil and Carmarthen.

The company, which has its headquarters near Criccieth in Gwynedd, employs 250 staff and runs a fleet of 65 vehicles to deliver up to 5,000 product lines to cafés, restaurants, pubs and public sector customers.

For more on Harlech Foodservice go to https://www.harlech.co.uk/, and for more on Cheshire Farm Ice Cream to https://www.cheshirefarmicecream.co.uk/ and for Sidoli go to https://sidolis-icecream.co.uk/