Darts Farm — Fifty-Five Years of Selling What the Field Grew

The Hut on the Roadside

It began in 1971 with Ronald Dart selling his own produce from a roadside hut called Picfresh — one of the first pick-your-own operations in the country, at a time when the phrase meant nothing to anybody. He died in 1982, while his sons were still young, having established the single idea the business has run on ever since: sell what you grow, directly, to the people who live nearby.

Michael and James Dart came home and built the rest of it around the farm their elder brother Paul runs, and that division has held for decades — two brothers on retail, one on the land. This year is the fifty-fifth, and the third generation has arrived: three of Michael's children and one of Paul's are now in the business. For a food operation of this size to still be answerable to one family on one farm is rarer than the sector's marketing would suggest.

The scale is genuinely large. Over three hundred people work on the site and more than seventeen thousand visitors come through in a week, which is a volume most independent retailers would struggle to serve without losing whatever made them worth visiting. The Guardian once described it as a Selfridges food hall a long way from London, which is both accurate and a slightly double-edged compliment.

What's on the Shelves

The farm team picks seasonal fruit and vegetables each morning and they go straight into the shop, which is the part of the operation that justifies everything else. The Ruby Red Devon herd grazes the banks of the Clyst in summer and supplies the butchery, where the cutting is done on site by hand.

Around that sits the food hall proper: West Country and British farmhouse cheeses, artisan bread and pastry, pies, local wine and craft beer, charcuterie, and a deli counter that took Slow Food's Best Deli in the UK and Best Greengrocer in England in 2020. The balance is the thing worth noting — genuinely local produce alongside high-end organic lines, so it works both as a weekly shop for people who live nearby and as a destination for people who have driven an hour to be there. Not many places manage to be both without the local half quietly losing out.

The awards are unusually consistent for a sector that hands them around freely. Darts was named the UK's best farm shop by the Farm Retail Association in 2025, its fourth UK title, and took Best Farm Café in the same year. The run goes back through Taste of the West and Food Reader wins to 2012 and beyond.

Lunch at The Farm Table

We ate at The Farm Table, which is the serious one of the several places to eat on the site — AA Rosettes, a Good Food Guide listing, and the Farm Retail Association's best farm café in the country for 2025. It is worth knowing that before you sit down, because the cooking should be judged against restaurants rather than against farm shop canteens, and it stands up to that.

Lamb breast and dressed crab, which between them say most of what there is to say about the kitchen. Breast is the cheap, slow, patient end of the animal and it only works if somebody has given it hours; dressed crab is the opposite, a dish with nowhere to hide, where the only variables are how fresh it is and how carefully it was picked. Both were very good. One demonstrated technique and the other demonstrated sourcing, which is a fair summary of the whole operation.

The kitchens treat the food hall as their larder, which is a sensible arrangement when the larder is this good, and it shows in the plainest way: the ingredients are the point and the cooking lets them be. The wider spread across the site, from the Fish Shed to the Shack, Cow & Cacao and The Yard, runs from a coffee and a pastry to a proper sit-down meal, which is part of how the place absorbs seventeen thousand people a week without feeling like a queue.

Why It Earns Its Place

What distinguishes Darts from the many farm shops that have copied the format is that the farm is not decorative. Paul Dart is still farming the land, the cattle on the riverbank end up at the butchery counter, and the vegetables are picked the morning you buy them. Plenty of places use the word farm as a design reference. Here it is a description of what happens outside.

The risk at this size is obvious, and anyone arriving expecting a muddy, rustic sort of place will find something considerably more polished. Whether that is a loss depends on what you came for. The produce is excellent, the sourcing is real, and a family business that has kept its own fields at the centre through fifty-five years and three generations has earned the right to be good at retail as well.

It also anchors a wider network. The meat at the River Exe Café, floating out in the estuary a few miles downstream, comes from here — which is as good a demonstration as any that this is a supplier to the region rather than simply a destination within it.