WHEN the Milk Marketing Board folded, it was followed by a rapid fall in milk prices, leaving family dairy farms such as Stephen and Judith Foreman’s farm at Skipsea unsustainable. Like many farming businesses, they had to diversify.

And it was a family trip to Vermont in the United States which showed them the way.

In 1997, Stephen and Judith visited Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream Factory at Waterbury, which proved life changing, said Judith.

They obtained a Rural Enterprise Scheme grant through DEFRA to build an ice cream factory with an ice cream parlour and customer seating area at the front, with the intention of only producing ice cream for Mr Moo’s Ice Cream Parlour.

The parlour became a hit with East Coast tourists and by the end of the first year of trading, turnover had exceeded predictions and they were consistently full.

The first winter, they extended the ice cream parlour, increasing seating to 80, and had already started designing packaging to meet the demands of a newly emerging wholesale market for customers including farm shops.

The parlour has since been extended to include a large outdoor seating area and has access to the beach via a DEFRA-funded conservation walk.

Mr Moo’s is now going for Small Business Of The Year and Family Business Of The Year at The Press Business Awards. The company supplies supermarkets as well as local councils and tourist attractions and Judith hints that exporting might soon be on the cards for the business.

“It has been a family joke ‘Today Yorkshire, tomorrow the world’. Well there has been a very large new freezer room installed, could that mean something?”