What better place to celebrate Dorset’s food, farming and producers than a grain store that had actually been full of this year’s harvest just days before?
Last night was the 2026 Love Local Trust Local Awards – and they could hardly have found a more appropriate venue. Forget polished hotel function rooms or fancy marquees: this was a vast working farm building, more used to housing tractors and grain than 180 happily chatting people on a night out. But add tables, flowers, a bar, C&O Tractors’ show trailer for a stage and a frankly heroic amount of fairy lights, and it became the perfect setting.
Because Love Local Trust Local (LLTL) has always been less interested in polished appearances than in what happens behind Dorset’s local products: the farmers who grow and rear our food, the producers and artisans who make things here, the independent businesses that sell them and the people working hard to keep Dorset’s economy genuinely local.
The bi-annual awards bring all of them together, recognising everything from farming and food production to hospitality, retail, sustainability and the young people beginning to make their mark.
And the winners are…
• Retailer: 1855 Artisan Store & Parkstone Fisheries – joint winners.
(Bradley Leatherwork highly commended)
• Food Producer: The Book & Bucket Cheese Company
• Food Product: Book & Bucket – Stowaway
• New Food Product: Tarrant Valley Honey – Orange & Ginger Honey
• Drinks Producer: Purbeck Cider – Community Cider
• Drink Product: Sandbanks Brewery
(Big Dig Brewhouse highly commended)
• Non-food Producer: Elly Harvey & Tarrant Valley Honey Candles – joint winners (Coastline Soaps highly commended)
• Hospitality: The Dorset Chef & The Wimborne Pig – joint winners, and Dorset Crafty Barn Tea Room named Best Café
• Business Growth: Boil and Broth
• Business Rising Star: The Open Flame Experience
(Coastline Soaps highly commended)
• Farming, Conservation & Sustainability: Myncen Farm
• Mentor of the Year: Honey by Ian
• Young Star Under 20: Ryan Davies & Analise Cooper – joint winners
• Young Star Over 20: Sophie Baker
(Fred Hosford highly commended)
For the winners themselves, the recognition from fellow Dorset businesses mattered.
‘We love being part of our local community and to get an award for what we do is fantastic,’ said Dave Marsh from Sandbanks Brewery. ‘LLTL is a fantastic organisation, it does an amazing job highlighting local companies. Last night was great fun, and we were so happy – all the businesses on our table won. To be judged amongst our peers and coming out on top is immense.’
The Dorset Chef, Mark Gainford, said: ‘The LLTL ethos is very close to my heart personally, but also to what The Dorset Chef stands for – using local producers and produce wherever I can in my menus. Seasonality is incredibly important in my work and I’m blessed that Dorset and Hampshire has so much insane produce that I can lean into.
‘It was great to see so many people and businesses attending last night’s event – it’s testimony to the incredible work that Barbara Cossins and her team have and are doing.’
A lifetime of local food and farming
The evening finished with two awards that deserved a little more time.
Presented by Dorset farmer James Cossins, the 2026 Lifetime Achievement Awards went to John Clarke of WS Clarke & Sons and John Hoskin of Maiden Castle Farm.
John Clarke represents the third generation of a Sixpenny Handley family business stretching back more than a century. His grandfather William Clarke began the business in 1915, having previously travelled the local area by horse and cart selling meat. The butcher’s shop later moved to 57 High Street, where it remains today, and John has been running the business for the past 25 years. The current team has more than 90 years of butchery experience between them.
John Hoskin’s Lifetime Achievement Award recognised a very different part of Dorset’s food story. The Hoskin family arrived as tenant farmers at Maiden Castle Farm in 1987 and have now farmed there for almost four decades, running beef, sheep and arable enterprises on land owned by the Duchy of Cornwall. Their crops help feed their own livestock, while the chalk downland farm is also home to lapwings, corn buntings, hares and other wildlife.
Both awards felt particularly fitting on a night devoted to celebrating people for whom ‘local food’ isn’t a marketing slogan, but decades of work.
There was something entirely, appropriately Dorset about gathering the local community not in a hotel ballroom, but in a working agricultural building that had barely finished with harvest before the tables went in and the fairy lights went up.
But the real achievement was filling it with 180 people who, between them, grow, rear, make, cook, sell and champion an extraordinary amount of what Dorset produces.
For one night, the grain store scrubbed up remarkably well.
Huge congratulations to all the winners of the 2026 LLTL awards 
