Hodmedod Ltd or Hodmedod's is a British food retail and production company founded in 2012 and based in Brampton in Suffolk. They specialise in British-grown pulses, grains and seeds. The company grew out of the Norwich Resilient Food Project, a community initiative initiated by Transition City Norwich[1][2] which asked whether a small city could feed itself and, if so, how diets and land use might need to change.

Hodmedod Ltd
Founded2012; 12 years ago (2012)
Headquarters,
United Kingdom
Websitehodmedods.co.uk

In 2014 they launched a range of three kinds of tinned British-grown fava beans,[3] and in 2017 they grew a commercial-scale crop of lentils, having been told that this was impossible in the British climate.[4]

In 2016 their organic quinoa, developed in Essex and grown in Suffolk, won Delicious magazine's produce award in the "From the earth (primary)" category.[5][6]

In 2017 they won the BBC Food & Farming Award "Best Food Producers" category.[7] In late 2019 they became the first company to offer British grown Chickpeas for sale in the UK.[8]

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The company logo shows a hedgehog. On the company website it is stated that Hodmedod is an East Anglian word for variously a hedgehog, a snail, an ammonite or curls in a girl's hair: all things small and curled up and thus possibly including beans and peas. "We chose the word for the name of our business simply because we like the sound of it, and feel that it reflects our East Anglian backgrounds and represents part of our forgotten heritage, a bit like the fava bean or black badger peas".[9] It is also a Berkshire word for a scarecrow.[10]

References

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  1. ^ "Who We Are". Transition City Norwich. Archived from the original on 25 January 2021. Retrieved 25 November 2020.
  2. ^ "Mean Beans". Transition Norwich Blog. 9 March 2012. Archived from the original on 31 October 2020. Retrieved 24 November 2020.
  3. ^ Nicholls, Luke (11 February 2014). "Hodmedod unveils home-grown British Baked Beans". Big Hospitality. Retrieved 26 February 2018.
  4. ^ "British lentil crop silences the bean counters". The Times. 31 August 2017. Archived from the original on 27 February 2018. Retrieved 26 February 2018.
  5. ^ "delicious. Produce Award winner: Hodmedod's". Delicious. 25 September 2016. Archived from the original on 27 February 2018. Retrieved 26 February 2018.
  6. ^ "British Quinoa". Hodmedod's. Archived from the original on 27 February 2018. Retrieved 26 February 2018.
  7. ^ "BBC Food & Farming Awards 2017". BBC. Archived from the original on 21 October 2017. Retrieved 26 February 2018.
  8. ^ "UK's first commercial crop of chickpeas harvested in Norfolk". TheGuardian.com. 29 August 2019. Archived from the original on 2 December 2019. Retrieved 9 January 2020.
  9. ^ "What's a Hodmedod?". Hodmedod. Archived from the original on 27 February 2018. Retrieved 26 February 2018.
  10. ^ Lewis-Stempel, John (2016). The Running Hare: the secret life of farmland. Random House. p. 99. ISBN 978-0-85752-326-6. Retrieved 26 February 2018.
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