There is perhaps no better emblem of autumn than the apple: its crisp sweetness and red-tinged skin a distillation of cooling air and crumpling leaves. Each year, apples mark the end of summer abundance and the beginning of the preservation season, as we rush to gather fruit for winter storage or press it into cider and juice.
This humble fruit is also deeply connected to Britain’s cultural and ecological history. Having arrived with the Romans, it quickly set up roots – blanketing the British countryside in orchards and creating thousands of distinct varieties in tandem with its human stewards. There is the Spartan with its thin skin and caramel-like sweetness; the Blenheim Orange with its creamy, nutty flesh; the Worcester Pearmain with its hint of strawberry; or the Rosette, a ruby-red variety with cotton-candy-coloured insides. Bramley. Discovery. Cox’s Orange Pippin.
Yet only a handful of these apple varieties are household names, and even fewer make it to supermarket shelves. The UK now imports twice as many apples as it grows and close to 90% of our traditional orchards have disappeared since the Second World War.
It is these remaining wild places and varieties that Wildpress, the team behind GAIL’s’ heritage apple juice, is working to protect.
Since 2019, Wildpress founders Nadeem Lalani Nanjuwany and Adam Grout have worked with small-scale British farmers and stewards of traditional orchards to craft cold-pressed juices with distinct flavour profiles and a sense of place. We’ve stocked their juices in our bakeries since 2022 as part of our commitment to supporting producers making meaningful change in our food system.
To learn more, we recently caught up with co-founder Nadeem at Waltham Place, a 220-acre biodynamic estate in Berkshire, and one of the very first farms the brand partnered with back in 2019.
It is early Autumn when we visit, and their apple trees are brimming with fruit – gleaming like jewels in a sea of verdant leaves. Birdsong nearly drowns out the roar of planes flying overhead.
Andre Tranquilini, the farm’s manager, serves us a pot of sage tea and some coffee with milk from their cows: both outrageously flavourful and sweet, a result of healthy soil and grass.
Nadeem first encountered biodynamics in 2010, he tells us, while visiting a biodynamic tea farm in Darjeeling. “The farmer was talking about soil health and the moon cycle and it was just an entirely new thing for me,” he says. “I think people have one of two reactions to that kind of thing: they either go ‘that sounds really whacky’ or ‘this makes complete sense’. For me, it was a gut feeling. I knew this was the way we should be doing things.”
A biodynamic farm like Waltham, is a “big array of small enterprises,” Nadeem explains – a healthy mix of crops, flowers, livestock, woodland and wildlife – as opposed to conventional monocultures. These entities work together to support a self-sustaining farming system as well as the surrounding ecosystem, prioritising environmental balance and overall health. Apple trees attract pollinators with their blossoms each spring and create year-round habitats for invertebrates and wild birds. Crops can be grown between the trees, and grazing livestock can be run through the orchards to feed on fallen fruit while fertilising the soil.
This is once how most British apples were grown – now replaced by vast monocultures reliant on agrochemicals and intensive machinery. Because of the cheap availability of imported apples, and the pressure that large-scale supermarkets put on growers to keep prices low, farmers who do grow apples here in the UK are struggling to turn profits with many selling off their land or converting it to higher-profit crops. Some 90% of the UK’s traditional orchards have disappeared since the Second World War, and those that do still exist are often under-utilised by farmers.
When starting Wildpress, Nadeem and Adam “realised [they] needed to meet UK farmers where they were. Sometimes farmers have orchards and aren’t even using them; the apples are just falling off the trees or they’re not economical to pick. We thought we should build a business that helps preserve these orchards and supports the farmers, too.”
Wildpress pays a higher, fairer price to growers preserving heritage varieties and practising sustainably. And they work on a variety of scales and adjust their juices to fit those scales, rather than pushing a farm or a group of farmers to fit their needs.
As a result, they offer a unique range of juices that fluctuates each year with the harvest; like their Rebel Harvest – a blend of 36 heritage varieties from a biodynamic farm in Lincolnshire – or their 100% Bramley, an experiment in which they left Bramley apples (a tart and bitter variety usually reserved for cooking) to ripen on the branch.
For GAIL’s, Wildpress works exclusively with Ed Jefferson of Hall End Farm in Herefordshire, a farm with a scale suited to our growing network of bakeries. It’s a cyclical relationship: through our partnership, we’ve helped Farmer Ed plant new trees, create wildflower meadows, and install natural ponds and living hedgerows around the trees. Just last year, Nadeem and Ed placed bird boxes throughout the orchards to attract Great Tits – wild birds that act as a natural form of pest control.
Their multi-tiered pricing model encourages responsible farming, paying the highest rate for biodynamic fruit, followed by organic, and then fruit from traditional, unmanaged orchards. This support gives farmers the financial flexibility to transition to more regenerative practices.
“There are many farmers who want to move to better practices but don’t have the means,” says Nadeem. “We are trying to support that. ‘We asked one farmer, ‘What if we pay you to just leave the orchard and not put down any fertiliser?’ and they were up for it’, he says. A simple agreement with a profound impact on the health of the soil and the flavour of the fruit. ‘We do take a slight risk buying fruit we don’t yet have, but so far so good,’ he smiles.”
Though still small-scale, Wildpress hopes to set an example for other brands to follow suit, Nadeem says. To show what’s possible when we build personal relationships rather than extractive ones, and prioritise diversity over uniformity.
Find the Wildpress x Gail's apple juice in all our bakeries.
