Thirty cows, a tearoom and some leftover milk.

Yeo Valley is named after the valley in Somerset where it began, and it still has its head office in the village of Blagdon, near Bristol. The company’s own history says that in 1961 Roger and Mary Mead bought Holt Farm there, with 30 cows, a few sheep and some crops. The business grew out of the farm rather than out of a factory: the Meads added a tearoom and pick-your-own fruit, and began turning leftover milk into yoghurt.

The date of that first yoghurt depends on which company text you read. Yeo Valley’s history page and English Wikipedia put it in 1972; a food-waste report the company published through Tesco for 2019 says the Meads started making yoghurt in 1974. Either way, the yoghurt was first sold from the farm and to local shops, English Wikipedia says, and by the 1980s, the company says, the herd and the staff had grown.

The Meads’ son Tim Mead took over the business in 1990, Director magazine reported in a 2009 profile. Organic production followed. The company dates its Yeo Valley Organic brand to 1994, after the deregulation of the Milk Marketing Board, when, it says, Tim Mead helped seven local organic farmers set up a co-operative to supply it. The brand grew from that small supply chain: Yeo Valley received a Queen’s Award for Enterprise in 2001 for developing an organic dairy supply chain, and another in 2006 for sustainable development, English Wikipedia says. Mary Mead was appointed OBE in the 2012 New Year Honours for services to sustainable dairy farming, FoodBev reported in January 2012.

A milk droplet, a heart and a rap.

Yeo Valley’s look has been redrawn several times, and each change is well recorded in the design press. In 2010 the London agency Pearlfisher gave it a new mark that set the Yeo Valley name inside a milk droplet, with softened lettering and the name kept green, FoodIngredientsFirst reported in July 2010; the new design covered about 100 products, starting with yoghurt pots that June.

Later that year the brand became famous for an advert. On 9 October 2010, during the first live show of that series of ITV’s The X Factor, Yeo Valley ran a two-minute film made by the agency BBH in which farmers rapped about life on the farm. Real Business reported in 2011 that it was the company’s first television campaign, shot over two days in May 2010 on the farm with its own cows and staff as extras, and that the total budget was about £5 million, most of it spent on media. The same report said that in the 12 weeks to Christmas 2010 brand awareness rose 71% and the value of sales grew 14.9% year on year. Farmers Weekly reported in 2011 that the rap had been watched about two million times on YouTube and inspired hundreds of spoofs and remixes. The rap was released as a download on iTunes in late October 2010. A sequel followed during The X Factor in October 2011: a farmyard boy band called The Churned, again by BBH, The Drum reported.

In 2012 the agency Big Fish redrew the identity around a heart. The Drum reported in February 2012 that the brief had been “to put the heart back into the valley,” in the words of Big Fish’s creative director Perry Haydn Taylor, and English Wikipedia says the business was rebranded as Yeo Valley Family Farm that March. In 2020 the word “Organic” replaced “Family Farm” inside the heart, Dairy Industries International reported, alongside a “Put Nature First” campaign launched on 1 September 2020 and a blackboard-style panel on the side of packs. The latest refresh, by the London studio B&B Studio, relaunched in March 2024: Transform magazine reported in January 2025 that it kept the hand-drawn typography and the heart, moved the lettering to a more “sympathetic green,” and redesigned the Kefir and Greek Recipe ranges with new names and abstract, humorous illustrations.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group all sell butter, cheese or other dairy products, and they come from Denmark, Ireland, France, the United States and Britain: Lurpak, Kerrygold, Président, Babybel, Philadelphia, Cathedral City and Yeo Valley. Dairy brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from farmer-owned co-operatives and family firms to names that now belong to much larger food groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner shop to a supermarket chiller.

A dairy brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a pack, a name and the kitchen or table it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, licensed its name to another maker or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its butter, cheese or yoghurt is actually made and packed.

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

One name, two makers.

Since 2018 the Yeo Valley name has been made by two different companies. On 8 February 2018 Arla Foods, the farmer-owned Danish-Swedish dairy co-operative, announced that it would buy Yeo Valley Dairies Limited, a subsidiary of Yeo Valley Group, together with the right to use the Yeo Valley brand in the UK for milk, butter, spreads and cheese under an intellectual-property licence. No price was disclosed. Arla said it wanted to encourage UK shoppers to trade up from standard to organic milk, butter and cheese. The UK Competition and Markets Authority cleared the deal in July 2018, DairyReporter reported. Yoghurt, ice cream, cream and desserts stayed with Yeo Valley Group, which remained owned by the Mead family.

Those products are made by the family company in the West Country. In its food-waste report for 2019, published through Tesco, Yeo Valley said it operated from six sites in Somerset and Devon, making organic and non-organic yoghurts at dairies in Blagdon, Cannington and Crewkerne, and ice cream, sorbets, frozen yoghurt and chilled desserts at Newton Abbot in Devon; the same report described it as the leading supplier of supermarket own-brand yoghurts in the UK. Day-to-day management has passed outside the family: The Grocer reported that Tim Mead handed the running of the business to Rob Sexton as chief executive in 2022, and in March 2025 TheBusinessDesk reported that Yeo Valley Production had bought Epicurean Dairy, maker of The Collective gourmet yoghurts, with Sexton welcoming the brand “to the Yeo Valley Production family.”

For a design guide, Yeo Valley shows how a hand-drawn heart, a word inside it and a single farm in Somerset can hold together a brand that two companies now make. Compare Lurpak, Arla’s own Danish butter brand, and Duchy Originals, another British organic name. For this guide we use a valley green, a heart red and a cream with a warm serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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