Our focus on sustainability as a business stretches back a lot further than 20 years, to 1983, when our late Chairman, Maitland Mackie, installed a small wind turbine to power the old piggery, making Mackie’s one of the first UK companies to install a grid connected wind turbine. The original turbine and the piggery no longer exist, but in their wake lies evidence of a sustained effort by Mackie’s over the intervening decades to reduce our carbon footprint.

The top of the hill on the farm overlooking the ice cream dairy now boasts four large (around 40 m tall) wind turbines, installed between 2005 and 2015, as well as 7000 solar panels over a 10-acre area which was (albeit briefly!) the largest solar farm in Scotland upon its completion in 2015. The combination of wind and solar complement one another, as the sun tends to peek out on less windy days.

These energy-focussed initiatives, along with our use of biomass boilers, which heat the office and farm buildings, has led to our generating twice as much energy ourselves as we use overall. The excess is directed into the UK’s national grid. 2021 saw the electricity meter which counts the electricity produced by the first three turbines alone reset to zero upon reaching the 100 million kWh mark. This means that we have produced enough energy to supply 2,500 family homes with electricity for 10 years, or drive an electric car around the world more than 14,000 times.

In addition to our focus on renewable energy, we have taken steps across the business and the farm to leave the land in a better state than we found it, including the planting of an arboretum – a home to over 112 varieties of trees. This takes us back to the Chinese proverb, which reminds us that sustainable action needs to be continuing.

In this spirit, we set ourselves some “Green Resolutions” which we will top up and change as we achieve them, or as new ideas occur.