Oatcakes at dawn: The truth about Duchy Originals

On the face of it, the Duchy Originals Cookbook is just another collection of recipes. It's handsomely designed and expensively produced with shiny paper, cool typography and photographs that redefine "gastroporn" - since they include loving shots of raw, soil-mottled potatoes, cute lambkins and free-range geese, they deserve a new name: "organo-porn". The text, by Johnny Acton and Nick Sandler, alternates hearty, terribly English dishes (like "maids of honour tarts" that date back to Henry VIII) with Look and Learn-style essays on where bacon comes from, and cute bulletins ("As we make our bumpy way round Home Farm...") from the barnyards of suppliers, emphasising their horny-handed professionalism and gruff decency.

By the end, you feel saturated with wholesomeness, carpet-bombed with authenticity, exhausted by its honest-to-God, back-to-the earth, zero-additive gastronomic integrity.

What you may forget is that this virtuous tome is the culmination of a 20-year revolution. Its 200 pages are the latest mission statement of the luxury-organic movement, the foodie-fundamentalist market that began life by urging people to try eating biscuits and sausages made in local farms rather than in factories, and graduated to whole lifestyle brands, offering eco-chic shower gels, recycled fabrics and gorgeously packaged organic wines to the well-heeled middle classes. A very lucrative, biodegradable world of low-energy lightbulbs, ethical clothing and designer gumboots.

It is, of course, all Prince Charles's fault. It's 20 years since he turned his country house, the wisteria-covered Duchy Home Farm at Highgrove, Gloucestershire, into a partially, then fully, organic farming operation. He had to endure a lot of ribbing about the "dotty fad" on which he seemed so keen; but he explained that all he was doing was banning agrochemicals from his soil and returning to old-English production methods.

Five years later, the Duchy Originals brand started life; its first product, handsomely packaged and modestly fanfared, was a packet of Oaten (sic) Biscuits. Their ingredients were the wheat and oats from Home Farm, and real butter, rather than hydrogenated fats. Walkers, the Highlands purveyor of shortbread, was asked to try experiments, and they fiddled with the recipe through 100 trial bakings until they (and the Prince) were happy.

Soon, they began to appear in Sainsbury's. The Prince's advisers had managed a clever double trick: selling the idea of organic purity in food without conjuring up visions of spotty bananas, garden-fete jam with handwritten labels, and bread as hard as granite slabs, and suggesting that it could be rather chic and classy.

After the biscuits, they diversified in several directions - Duchy spring water, Duchy bacon, Duchy ice-cream - and in doing so, gradually moved from the immediate environs of Highgrove. The bacon came from Denhay Farms in Dorset, the sausages from a Mr Lazenby in Teesside. For fresh bread, they went to a London-based Italian baker called La Fornaia. In 2002, on the 10th anniversary of his triumphant biscuits, the Prince said: "One of the most rewarding aspects of the business is seeing a whole range of specialist suppliers, many of them small family businesses, growing with us and sharing in the success."

And there's no doubt about its success. The most recent figures announced retail sales of more than £38m, and a profit of £1.2m, the fourth year it has cleared the million mark in profits, which are donated to the Prince's Trust charity. But success has come at a price, which is the credibility of the company in the eyes of the foodie faithful. For it is a truth almost universally acknowledged that the story of Duchy Originals has involved compromises and ethical blips, wedded to a determined merchandising programme, the kind you don't normally associate with Dorset damson-growers.

"My only problem with Duchy Originals," says Rose Prince, the food writer and author of The Savvy Shopper, "is that very little of what they sell is made on the premises. Walkers, who make their biscuits, for instance, isn't a company that operates on organic principles, it's just a place that can be hired. And there was an instance when it was over-zealous and introduced products that don't fit in with its stated ethos."

She recalls the kerfuffle caused by the arrival at the company of Sue Townshend, a former brand manager at Crabtree & Evelyn, the luxury-goods company whose fragrantly packaged tea and biscuits have furnished the gift shop of many a stately home. Under her management, it seems that Duchy Originals began to source non-organic tea from Crabtree. This is not, in itself, a hanging offence, but after Radio 4's The Food Programme investigated, the company was embarrassed.

This year, the Duchy was in the soup when Scottish fishermen protested about its use of Alaskan salmon for its Duchy Selections' Smoked Salmon. "It's a bit of a snub to Scottish field farmers," said Julie Edgar of the Scottish Salmon Producers' Organisation. "The Prince could have found excellent salmon here. When you consider that this Alaskan salmon will be shipped thousands of miles to be smoked in Scotland, it runs against the green ethos of the Duchy. Scotland has a well-established organic fish-farming industry." The Duchy reported that it had chosen Alaskan salmon because it was "part of the Marine Stewardship Council's approved sources of sustainable fish stocks". But the snub still irritated the Caledonian fishermen.

"I don't blame Prince Charles," says Rose Prince. "Since the brand got to be so big, it's hard for him to keep an eye on it full-time, and make sure his people are doing the right thing, though to his credit, he is quick to act when there has been a poor judgement. There was such an issue of principle involved when it started up, the company can't afford not to do what they say they will."

The Duchy's claims about principled food production have long fascinated Henrietta Green, food guru behind Foodloversbritain.com and the woman who launched speciality food markets in England. "I remember wondering about Duchy Originals when they issued a press release claiming their sausages were 'reared to Highgrove Welfare Standards'," she said.

"What were these standards? Who decided what they were? Who authenticated them? Where can you read about them? And that word 'organic' is very problematic: it isn't a food-quality standard, it's just a means of production, an environmental standard. It does absolutely nothing to ensure the purity of the food, or its eating quality. Did you know an organic biscuit can have hydrogenated fats in it?"

Ms Green's is the authentic voice of the disappointed foodie, mildly disgusted to find that the former cutting edge of the organic revolution is now a brand as familiar, if not yet quite as popular, as Bird's Eye or Walls.

"When they set up, everyone thought they were marvellous, but I wondered about their raison d'être; Prince Charles was deliberately aiming to produce a large brand, so he didn't, by and large, work with small, speciality-food producers. He went to medium-to-large producers who could handle the volume but wouldn't necessarily employ craft techniques. When they were making their much-feted, foul-tasting and short-lived drinks, I believe they were made by Coca-Cola."

So prodigiously has the company expanded its operations, it has begun to embrace the inorganic, the metallic, the glassy; special biscuit tins, gift hampers, Kilner jars. The Duchy Originals range of garden tools was a big sell-out at this year's Chelsea Flower Show. Its bathroom toiletries were specially name-checked by the company chairman in the 2005 report.

Just as the Duchy is getting too successful for its ethical boots, a rival company has entered the organic-food lists. It's the National Trust, the country's biggest landowner and largest conservation, or "heritage" charity. Two weeks ago, it launched a food brand in direct competition with Duchy Originals. In fact, it was less a brand than an emblem of excellence, the Fine Farm Produce Award, which it bestowed on 13 products from tenant farms on NT property.

They include organic cheese from Kendal, topside beef from Stourhead, sausages from Tamworth, cider from Killerton and damson jam from Brockhampton. The foodstuffs are kept well clear of large-scale production: the jam, for instance, is made on the kitchen range at Hedge House Farm in Shropshire using a family recipe. The awards are given for "delicious-tasting, top-quality produce" which "look, smell and taste superb" and meet NT environment standards. It is significant that, among the citations of the 13 favoured products, the word "organic" is hardly mentioned.

"The Trust has been shamed into doing this," says Rose Prince, "after years in which they made life difficult for their small tenant farmers. The farmers on Trust land never felt the Trust was going to help them, if they tried to make food products that could sell. I remember a farmer from the Isle of Purbeck who made delicious heather honey. He couldn't sell it in the shop at Corfe Castle because they already sold honey marked 'Product of more than one country'. This is a huge U-turn."

Henrietta Green worked with the National Trust to select its 13 awardees, and is more sanguine about the Trust's ethical position. "The point is that the food we have passed for the Produce Award is 100 per cent tip-top absolutely pure and kosher and as it should be. The idea is not to make the farm increase its supply of the food - you can't, because there are only so many damsons on the estate - but to encourage other farmers to start doing it on their estate with the same commitment and passion to local distinctiveness."

Is this the way forward for the luxury-organic market? As the prototype Duchy Originals becomes an ever-larger brand, has the time come for small tenant farms to step into the limelight? Or is it only a matter of time before they too start diversifying into designer watering cans?