The Mackie family have been farming at Westertown for more than 100 years. The long-term mind-set of farmers and of family business owners is aligned with sustainability, with it being important for both that the land and business is passed on to the next generation in a better state than it was found. Mackie’s commitment to the environment can be seen in its many sustainable initiatives across the farm and business.

Since the early 2000’s, Mackie’s vision has been to be “a global brand from the greenest company in Britain, created by people having fun.”

Water capture happens all over the farm, where we take advantage of being on the hillside to capture the rain which falls and runs underground and in streams. This provides all the water for the houses on the farm, the office, the factory buildings and the cows. Several tanks are dotted around the farm to help us capture as much as we can.

While the big investments are often the most immediately impressive, sometimes smaller more thoughtful projects can end up being the most special. We’d argue that this has proved to be the case for the arboretum planted on site by Mac, Karin and Kirstin (Mackie’s current business owners)’s late mother, Halldis.

One of a number of areas of woodland on the farm, the arboretum contains over 112 varieties of tree and 150 trees and shrubs. The benefit is twofold, with the trees themselves acting as carbon sinks over the duration of their lives, as well as providing a beautiful place for future generations to enjoy.

Since 1980, our farm office has been covered with a grass roof, helping keep the office cool in summer and warm in winter, while also helping provide a little boost to biodiversity on the farm. The grass was planted by our late chairman, Maitland Mackie, who was inspired by the grass roofs he saw in Norway when visiting with his Norwegian wife, Halldis.

In 1983, our late Chairman, Maitland Mackie, installed a small wind turbine to power the old piggery, making Mackie’s one of the first UK companies to install a grid connected wind turbine. The original turbine and the piggery no longer exist, but in their wake lies evidence of a sustained effort by Mackie’s over the intervening decades to reduce its carbon footprint.

The top of the hill on the farm overlooking the ice cream dairy now boasts four large (around 40 m tall) wind turbines, installed between 2005 and 2015. The four turbines have capacity of 3MW. We generate 8570 MWh per year from wind alone – that’s roughly equivalent to the amount of energy required for over 2000 homes for a year!

Tucked behind our wind turbines are over 7000 solar panels over ten acres of fields. When completed, this was the largest solar farm in Scotland. As it’s windier in Aberdeenshire than it is sunny, the turbines generate more power overall. However, it tends to be sunnier on days which are less windy, so the two means of power generation dovetail nicely.

Across the farm, we produce more than twice as much energy than we use. The extra energy is fed back into the UK’s national grid, helping homes, businesses and the country run on renewably generated energy – taking us closer to our shared goals of net zero.

We make all of our own fruit compotes, sauces and honeycomb on the farm before swirling and sprinkling them into our different flavours of ice cream and chocolate. As well as allowing us complete control over what goes into them and how delicious they taste, this saves thousands of transport miles a year, with the finished sauces and honeycomb heading a couple of hundred metres from the “sweetie kitchen” over to the ice cream dairy.

We source all of the fruit we use in our sauces and compotes from other farms around Scotland. As well as to reduce transport miles, we do this in recognition of the deliciously sweet soft fruit grown in Scotland, while also giving our support to other Scottish farming businesses.

Our four injection moulding machines allow us to make all of our own packaging on site. This saves over 50,000 transport miles each year, because having one lorry-load of the raw material (pellets) delivered would equate to six lorry-loads of finished tubs.

All the tubs and lids are fully recyclable, with plastic remaining the best means of packaging a 1 litre tub of ice cream, which has to undergo extremes in temperature (from over 200 degrees in its creation to lower than -30 in the freezing of our ice cream), not to mention the bashing involved with their going in and out of kitchen freezers!

In 2014, we lined the roof of the byre (the Scottish word for “cow shed”) with solar panels, to help boost our renewable energy capacity and to run our voluntary milking machines more sustainably.

We produce nearly all of the fresh milk we use in every tub of our real dairy ice cream here on the farm. This saves on transport miles, and the emissions associated with keeping milk cool as it moves from place to place. Instead, our milk travels about 100-200 metres between cow and tub!

2014 saw the roof of the chocolate factory lined with solar panels, to boost our renewable energy capacity even further. With a south facing roof, it is situated perfectly to soak up the rays on sunnier days.

Since the 1970s, thousands of trees have been planted across the farm at Westertown. Over 150 acres is now established as woodland, providing natural fuel for biomass energy and creating beautiful surroundings year-round as the leaves blossom and change colour.

Our delivery van makes its way around local businesses, delivering our delicious ice cream and chocolate. It also delivers new and exciting flavours to our parlour, Mackie’s 19.2, in Aberdeen.

Using our own transport for short deliveries avoids additional miles on our products as they do not have to make their way to a central distribution point before reaching shops and cafes.

In 2022 we completed installation of a large, super-efficient, low-carbon refrigeration plant. We’re now using sustainable energy sources – biomass heat and ammonia, a natural refrigerant gas with no climate warming threat – to cool our ice cream and store it.

It’s an innovative mix of technology and a first for Scotland, part-funded by the Scottish Government’s Low Carbon Infrastructure Transition Programme, combining an ammonia plant and an absorption chiller to “cool with heat” from a new biomass boiler.

The farm crop strategy is centred around growing crops to feed our cows. Currently, this sees us grow 600 acres of grass and 900 acres of cereals to feed our strong and healthy, black and white Holstein milking cows.

A natural fertiliser, which is spread on our fields, is also created here on the farm by mixing slurry from the cows with wastewater. This reduces the amount of commercial fertiliser products we need to buy and saves on the fossil fuels used to manufacture it.