30 Years of KellyBronze

In 2014, we celebrated 30 years of KellyBronze with customers, friends, suppliers, local farmers and members of the food trade and press in the woodland at Danbury, Essex. More than 70 guests gathered among the eight-week-old turkeys, with the occasion providing an opportunity to look back at the development of KellyBronze since the 1980s and to share how our approach to breeding, woodland rearing and eating quality had developed over those three decades. Our own company history remembers the occasion simply as taking friends, customers and press “to the woods, to party with the turkeys.” During the celebration, Paul Kelly announced the purchase of a 106-acre farm in the foothills of Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains. The farm provided pasture and woodland for rearing KellyBronze turkeys and was intended to increase production for the US Thanksgiving market. By then, KellyBronze had been test-marketed in Virginia for two years, and the 1,000 birds being produced for Thanksgiving that November had already been sold. Plans also included a small processing facility so that the birds could be dry-plucked, hung and prepared using the methods established in the UK. The anniversary therefore brought together two parts of the KellyBronze story: a celebration of the first 30 years and the announcement of a practical step towards establishing production in the United States. The Virginia operation subsequently became an important part of our approach to serving the US Thanksgiving market.