Give Someone a Leg Up This Christmas: 2025 Update

I’ve been doing turkeys for Christmas for over a decade now. Whole turkeys are a privilege to source, organise, dress and deliver, and represent one of the simplest relationships in retail. John, our turkey farmer, is at the other end of the phone all year round. We give him our order before Easter, he gets our poults, grows them on and it’s our job to make good on our commitment to find Christmas tables for them all, which we’ve always managed to do. They turn up and we put them in boxes for you, our turkey-obsessed customers. I stand by the fact that after having what I call a ‘proper turkey’, there’s no way back to normality!

My goal over these past few years has been to swim against the current and find homes for as many turkey legs as we do breasts, and we’re now there thanks to the Leg Up campaign. Not only does this mean that we buy all the legs off of the crowns we sell, but we donate them to FareShare South West, who are the experts in distributing food to those in need through the year and especially at Christmas. This makes the campaign each year a win-win-win, since farmers get paid for turkey legs that they would otherwise freeze, downgrade into pet food contracts or give away, FareShare South West get free range, game hung turkey to feed those in need during the cost-of-living crisis, and we solve the issue of food waste in these amazing animals each year.

An absolutely amazing spin-out of the campaign, now entering its fourth Christmas, is that we get to talk about turkey legs a lot, and you guys pick them up, get creative and make brilliant turkey dinners at a fraction of the price of a whole bird or crown. I maintain that our Free Range Bronze Turkey Legs are the best possible value when it comes to free range meat, especially considering the 1kg pack size is a minimum and sometimes they can get closer to 2.5kg delivered (sometimes!). The legs come from the same bronze birds that have been free range, game hung, dry plucked. It’s only for the law of associated goods that they’re underpriced. Each year the market is flooded with a pair of legs for every highly sought-after breast sold, and that’s when conventional demand can’t possibly meet supply and the poor things are disregarded. But no more! Our mission is to raise awareness, make a dent in the estimated 9 million legs that can potentially go to waste, and start a movement to give farmers and those in need a leg up, every Christmas.

This year I’ve really got the bit between my teeth, and I’ve sought to make the most of the bones that come from our boneless breast rolls. We’re paying the farmer for them and making Leg Up Turkey Bone Broth with our partners, SPRING Broth, then donating all the profits to Fareshare. This is another win-win, and I had the privilege of doing the testing on the broth. If I may be so bold, it’s sensational. My brief to Tom (Chief Brothman of SPRING) was that it had to taste rich, clean, and irresistible. It’s good enough to drink on its own with a grind of salt, but I’ve also written a super simple recipe on the label for making a gravy, and we’ve been making turkey noodle broth in the office with this. Just add some coriander, a pack of noodles and one of our Turkey Thigh Fillets with Sea Salt & Black Pepper. I can imagine this broth healing me in the gloomy evenings of early January!

I don’t think I’d be overstating it by saying that being a part of this campaign is the high-point of my career so far. Each year it gathers momentum thanks to all of you, and when so much around us feels like an uphill climb, the returning joy of our Leg Up campaign reminds me that the good is still out there. You’re on board with the message and the mission, and your trust allows us to keep the door open for free range farming, and we are galvanised in our efforts to hold fast and weather the storm. I dream of a world where free range is a minimum standard, and the first step to getting there is to find a group of people that believe the same thing and stay engaged with it. In reading this and backing campaigns like Leg Up, that group of people includes you.