A 30km Wide Apple Doughnut

High Peak Industries Ltd. is a small business looking to build hyper-local, regenerative food and drink projects that engage with the community, use local resources and look to educate and inspire others.

High Peak Juice and High Peak Cider are two projects that we run in the Autumn, where we invite growers of apples and pears, with trees within 15km of our base in Furness Vale to donate their fruit in return for some apple juice or cider.

We strongly believe in "learning by doing" and as such offer volunteering sessions for both apple pressing and bottling. In addition to this, we also visit local primary schools, where we give the children some hands-on experience and teach them the process of making juice.

After each of the pressings. the resultant apple pomace is picked up by local farmers and used as feed.

We sell all the remaining apple juice and cider to local cafes, shops, off licences & pubs. We have a number of bottle deposit schemes running, so we can re-use the glass juice bottles that are returned.

This year we have logged all the types of apples that we received from our donors. The intention is firstly to try and identify all of the unknown cultivars we have received and produce an apple map for the local area. We would then like to add extra data sets, such as blossom dates etc. for each of the trees and hopefully be able to build comprehensive database that can show us how the effect of climate breakdown might be altering the growth, health and productivity of the trees over time, within our "30km wide apple doughnut"!