I write to update you on some changes we have had to put in place to our order system for the Priors Flour to enable us to continue to deliver great customer service and manage increasing demand for our products; also to advise that the mail order team will be taking a holiday in early October, so the service will be offline between the 1st October and 9th October.

We have been overwhelmed (in a positive way) by the increased interest and demand for our products over the last six months. For very understandable reasons, the changes requiring millers to add folic acid to flour have resulted in many new customers searching out mills such as ours (who benefit from the “small mills exemption”. Our mail order business is now operating at well over 300% more business than the same time last year and customers to our shop have also increased significantly. We are very grateful for your business and for the comments and reviews that you have left us.

This level of demand has, however, presented a few challenges for us. As some of you will have seen in recent weeks, we have had to encourage you to hold off ordering to enable us to clear backlogs of orders which have built up. Our usual fulfilment time of between 3 and 5 working days has been pushed out as we have constraints in terms of milling time and packing time. We’ve learned a great deal about running an online business and managing our levels of stress! These are good problems to have, but we have to make sure our business is sustainable and that, equally, we continue to give you good customer service including a reasonable turn-around-time from order to delivery.

Weekly Stock Updates

To enable us to manage the current levels of demand through our website, we have now introduced a weekly stock update process. This has been active for 3 weeks. We now have a maximum number of units for each product which are available each week through the online shop. These numbers are based on what we can realistically mill and pack each week given our trade orders (bakeries, restaurants and retail outlets), available milling time and our stock of grains. You may, therefore, find that occasionally a product is out of stock. That will be because orders have exceeded what we can produce in that week. Our stock levels will be updated each Friday early evening ready for our new week. We continue to do most of our packing and dispatch on Wednesdays and Thursdays.

Improved Courier Services

We are pleased to advise that APC Couriers are now handling most of our shipping (other than single 1.5kg orders and those to Highland & Island areas). Their service is a 24 hour service to England, Wales and Lowland / Central Scotland and we have had very low levels of parcel damage or loss.

Mail Order service offline 1st to 9th October 2026

Please note that our team members who pack flour for mail order dispatch are taking a break between the above dates. Stock will therefore NOT be available to order between these times on the online shop. The mill shop will remain open as usual for those of you close to the mill and flour will be available for sale as usual.

We hope you understand…

We hope you understand our reasons for making these changes. We pride ourselves on giving you a personal service, providing first rate quality products and sharing our passion for great artisanal flour. We will continue to innovate and work to improve our production capacity whilst working within the constraints that our historic machinery afford.

We look forward to serving you soon!

Jon Cook

We’ve just come to the end of our first maintenance week for 2026. It takes a huge amount of work and expense each year to keep Fosters Mill in working condition. This year, as the video below explains, we’ve been focusing on sail painting, repairs to the brick work of the tower and maintenance and painting of the fan stage and fantail.

Your flour purchases are what funds this vital work, so thank you for all you continue to do to support us. Hire of a cherry picker alone costs well over £600.00, plus materials and the time of our millwright.

The mill is looking fantastic – enjoy!

It’s National Mills Weekend this coming weekend and both mills in Swaffham Prior will be open on Sunday 10th May from 2pm to 5pm.

Learn more about our event here:

We hope you can join us. We’ll be posting further updates over the coming days. Our year so far has been incredible with a huge surge in weekly orders. We apologise if you’ve had to wait longer than usual for your deliveries – it’s been a challenge keeping up with our orders.

Thank you for your understanding and patience!

The last few months have been a whirlwind for the team at Priors Flour HQ! We’ve been inundated with orders from both our wonderful existing customer base and from a significant number of new customers. I’d therefore like to take this opportunity to share a little of my passion for baking, for great stoneground flour and for our fabulous milling heritage.

To those new to the Priors Flour range, I hope this short video provides some background to our work and to our most important asset, our Grade 2* listed working windmill which produces all your flours.

I could talk for hours about milling and baking, fingers crossed there is just enough here… but not too much!

If you like these kind of updates, please let me know. I refer to our purpose built mill shop and packing space in the video – I decided to leave that to another video, so watch out for that soon!

It’s been hugely gratifying to get a good deal of positive feedback about our Edelmann variety high protein milling wheat which is powering your white and wholemeal bread flours. We’re delighted you are enjoying baking with it.

Jon Cook, The Priors Flour

We are delighted to announce that our heritage grain blend “Millers Choice” is at last, back in stock! The grain is once again grown by Paul Bowler (Durie & Partners) at Camp Green Farm near Stowmarket, Suffolk (see Paul’s photo below in a field of Millers Choice grain!). The grain is from Paul’s 2025 harvest.

Below, I share the history of this wheat population and what you can, once again, look forward to!

Millers Choice is known as a wheat “population” – it is a collection of different varieties of wheat which have similar characteristics, varieties that date back to the 18th and 19th Centuries. Created, or curated by Andy Forbes of the Brockwell Bake Association, Andy took a selection of wheat berries (seeds) from another population put together from seed banks by John Letts (organic farmer and grain specialist) and created a population with a strong dominance of Lammas type varieties. Lammas varieties dominated in the British Isles up until the mid 19th Century and were renowned for their bread baking qualities.

To this population he added 20% of Spanish long straw variety grains to improve the populations ability to withstand drought.

The result is a wheat population which produces a soft, creamy flour with huge flecks of golden bran with bags of flavour.

Here we see the Millers Choice grain growing – look carefully (right click on the image and you can open it in a new tab) and you will see that the ears of wheat in the photo are different – some have hairs, some are almost ripe, some are still green. You are looking at the different varieties of wheat in the population, all with their subtly different characteristics. These characteristics make the crop much more resilient to different climatic conditions – rather than the whole crop struggling, some varieties struggle whilst others thrive!

I am still experimenting with the flours to fully explore the baking characteristics, but I share below some images from the Brockwell Bake of Millers Choice White flour baked off into delicious boules!

Our Millers Choice wheat is grown at Camp Green Farm, Debenham, Suffolk. You can now purchase wholemeal and white Millers Choice flours from our mill shop (online or in person). We are grateful to Andy Forbes and to Durie Partners for their help in preparing this article.