About Us

Gill & Martin are the faces behine Capra Products & this is there story, so far . . . .

Just over 25 years ago we bought our first two goats because our youngest daughter Katy had eczema and goats milk was a more natural way of controlling her condition.

As I was interested in hand spinning,  our next  purchase was two cashgora goats for the fibre.
It was at this point that Martin gave up smoking and  we decided to put the money into an account and save for something , this something turned out to be the down payment for our smallholding now known as Marimar.

The goats moved on site in 1989 shortly followed by us in April 1990, when we got planning permission for a static caravan.
Unfortunately at the end of four years the planners didn’t feel that we had fulfilled their criteria, so we sold off a considerable number of goats most of which by now were fibre goats & I continued to hobby farm the goats we had left.

Some one else had other plans for us, for the first time in years we decided to have a holiday only to come back to find that our three Billy Goats had managed to escape and get in the field with the nannies.

The following spring we had a bumper crop of kids and during this time a friend had taught me how to make a simple goat’s cheese, which I made for the family.

The family was now growing up and with the encouragement from a restaurateur I started to develop our cheese range.
In 1999 Martin became ill meaning I  had to go back to work full time. 
Katy was still at school so I needed to have work that was flexible, I went out cleaning and caring which enabled me to also work part time from home.

I went to college and did an NEBS course to see if my ideas were viable. 
We then tried to get planning permission for a dairy and to live back on site, this proved more difficult than we expected.
We also discovered that I couldn’t make cheese in my kitchen to sell to the public, hence the start of us selling goat meat.
To gain the planning permission we had to grow the size of the herd , with no where to make the milk into cheese we fed the milk back to the kids and with the help of our vet found a small abattoir for the meat side of our enterprise.

We started with one market a month in Manchester making mainly Goat burgers and sausages. I would cook some and then walk up and down the market with tasters, we soon had a following for our products, many of whom we still see regularly at the markets today.

I went to college to expand my knowledge in the food industry and during this time got a placement at a local dairy one day a week., they allowed me to have access to their facilities to make small quantities of our cheese and encouraged me to enter competitions with my cheese.

In 2006 after a long battle with the planners we were eventually back on site, the dairy was eventually built in 2008 and all the i’s were dotted and the t’s crossed at the end of 2009.

We were now an approved dairy.

Gill & Martin Can be seen at markets every weekend in Lancashire and Cheshire as well as Food Festivals.

Capra Products continue to do a small amount of competing, recently achieving a Supreme Champion at Great Harwood Show and a Gold  Award at The British Cheese Awards in 2010.

Capra Products has been approached by some veterinary students from Liverpool University for some work experience and due to this we are now on the database for the university and happy to offer placements.