A borrowed recipe, a kitchen table and a car full of cases.

Belvoir Farm makes its drinks in Bottesford, a village in the Vale of Belvoir in north-east Leicestershire, between Grantham and Nottingham. The company asks people to say its name “Beeva,” and made a joke of the point in its first television advert in 2022, the Grantham Journal reported. The business began in 1984, and its founding drink is still its best known: an elderflower cordial made from the flowers of the hedgerow elder.

The recipe came from the family kitchen. The company says Mary Manners, the mother of today’s managing director, first made the cordial at home with water, sugar, lemons and freshly picked elderflowers, and that the recipe has not changed since. The Spectator reported in 2022 that she had been given it by Lady Astor while staying at Cliveden, where it was always on the drinks tray, and that the family began commercial production in 1984 with 100 cases. FoodChain magazine, interviewing the company’s production director in 2022, said Lord and Lady John Manners had set up the business as a fruit farm that was only mildly successful, and turned unsold fruit into juice and cordial to keep it going.

The early selling was done by hand. The company says the whole family helped with the first batch, and that 88 cases, or 1,056 bottles, were sold that year to local shops and farm shops. The Spectator described carloads of local children being driven around the Vale by the family to pick the flowers.

Elderflower first, then everything else.

Elderflower still sets the calendar. Each June, for about six weeks, the company runs an elderflower harvest: its own team and paid local pickers gather flowers from a 60-acre organic elder plantation and from wild hedgerows in Leicestershire and the three counties that border it, and the company says the flowers are in the vat within 24 hours of picking. It dates the plantation to 1998. Pickers are paid by the kilo, The Spectator noted, and the harvest has become a public event with an open call for helpers.

The range grew around the cordial. The company says it added raspberry and lemon cordials in 1986, had nine cordial flavours by 1993, and launched its first lightly sparkling drinks, the pressés, in 1997. Later additions, as the trade title Speciality Food described them in a 2023 partner feature, include ginger and seasonal cordials, warmed winter punches, a range of non-alcoholic cocktails in 2021 and sparkling mixers in 2022, alongside no-added-sugar cordials. FoodChain said the company had also launched a botanical range developed by an in-house innovation team.

Production moved from the kitchen table to a small unit and then to a purpose-built factory opened in 2015, the company says, with capacity for nearly 20,000 bottles an hour. FoodChain reported in 2022 that the business was producing about 22 million bottles a year and quoted gross sales of £27 million for the previous year; The Spectator put sales of its elderflower cordial alone at some ten million bottles worldwide in a year. The drinks are made on the farm where the brand is based, the Grantham Journal reported in 2022, when the company employed 80 people in Bottesford.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group all make soft drinks or cordials, and all of them come from Britain: Irn-Bru, Vimto, Ribena, Lucozade, Tango, Fentimans and Belvoir Farm. British soft-drink brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family firms that still carry a founder’s name to names that now belong to much larger drinks groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner shop to a supermarket shelf.

A soft-drink brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single recipe than by a bottle, a colour, a name and the moment it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its bottling or grown far beyond the town where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its drinks are actually made and bottled.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its drinks are made and how its packaging has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A new name, a looser hand and staff on television.

For most of its life the brand was called Belvoir Fruit Farms. In February 2021 it emerged with a shorter name, Belvoir Farm, and a new identity by the design agency B&B studio, which said the change was meant “to tell a truer, more authentic story” and to reach a younger audience. B&B kept what it called the brand’s recognisable assets — the handwritten type, the angled label and the ingredient illustrations — but pushed them in a wilder direction. The new logotype, by the lettering artist Rachel Joy Price, is less ornate and calligraphic than before; the illustrations, drawn in-house at B&B, grow into the label from the side, and the agency said the packs lost their “country fair” feel, design site Logo Designer and Marcomm News reported. The company dates an earlier update of its branding and a new cordial bottle to 2009.

Advertising followed. In July 2022 Belvoir Farm ran its first television advert, during ITV2’s Love Island, built around a new line, “Welcome to our Wild”, and made with the agency Hell Yeah!; it cast the company’s own staff and pickers rather than actors, the Grantham Journal reported. The same year The Grocer named it Soft Drinks Brand of the Year at its Grocer Gold Awards. The company says it refreshed its sparkling, mocktail and no-added-sugar packs again in 2025, ran its largest advertising campaign that year, and became a certified B Corporation in 2025.

The business has stayed in the family. Peverel “Pev” Manners, Mary’s son and, The Spectator says, a cousin of the Duke of Rutland, runs it as managing director, and the company describes itself as still run by the Manners family.

For a design guide, Belvoir Farm shows how a hand-lettered name, a tilted label and drawn flowers can carry a kitchen recipe onto a supermarket shelf. Compare Ribena, another British cordial, and Fentimans, the botanical soft-drink maker. For this guide we use hedgerow green, a pollen yellow and an elderflower cream with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Belvoir Farm’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.