Kent Non Alcoholic Drink of the Year Finalist: Dallaway's Kentish Cherry Juice

Dallaways Cherries specialises in growing the very best Kent cherries – this focus on one crop means we produce cherries and juice of the very highest quality. Production and sales of our cherry juice have doubled during the past three years! We attend up to a dozen farmers' markets at weekends selling fresh Kent cherries and cherry juice as well as food shows nationwide selling our cherry juice. We run a two-month seasonal farm shop selling our cherries and an online shop through which we ship our cherry juice nationwide.

We are a small team of three very hard-working full-time employees, supplemented by another four self-employed local farm workers who work with us when required during peak periods. During harvest we recruit up to an additional 30 members of staff for harvesting and customer service.

We have been growing cherries since 1986. Back then we had a mix of cherries and apples, but over time have become 100% focused on being a specialist cherry farmer. We grow more than 20 different varieties Sandhurst which all have their own particular characteristics with different levels of sweetness, firmness and tanginess, making every kilo of cherries bought from us a different eating experience. This in-depth knowledge of the fruit we grow and care we provide to the crop each year shines through in our cherries each year. The quality of our cherries, by extension, leads to a cherry juice bursting full of flavour and goodness. Cherries are ram-packed full of anthocyanins - a glass of cherry juice each day has fantastic health benefits!

Making cherry juice enables us to be a farm that really does produce minimal waste and we are looking into ways to use the byproduct from the pressed cherries to try to become a zero-waste enterprise. All of our packaging is 100% recyclable, including the boxes we pick the cherries into and the punnets that they are sold in.

We are also developing a Kirsch from our pure cherry juice in conjunction with Anno Distillers - this enables us to also use the cherry stones! We work very closely with Biddenden Vineyards to produce the best possible juice from our cherries each year and they also help to deliver our juice to farm shops in the South East to help reduce our collective delivery mileages.

During the last six years, our cherry juice has become stocked in farm shops nationwide as the awareness of the benefits of cherry juice have become increasingly widespread. The cherry industry is thriving from recent investments and we are excited to see what new developments await as the industry continues to grow.