Simon Mellin is trying to bring the milkman back

The Modern Milkman is both contemporary and nostalgic, combining the best of what we’ve lost with the best of what we’ve gained, writes Heather Martin

Mine’s a pint: ‘Everything the milk round was, it’s so powerful as a proposition: it’s everything we should be,’ says Simon Mellin (Modern Milkman)

People my age don’t get food,” Simon Mellin says. “It’s fashionable, but they’ve lost touch with its origins. Not just where it comes from, but how you buy it, who you buy it from, the frequency of the purchase, the amount you waste, the respect you have for it, your understanding of it – everything around it, we’ve lost.”

Simon lost touch too for a while, when he ditched his job at Mellin’s Family Butchers in Nelson to chase a dream in the motor industry, building cars for Ferrari, Aston Martin and Porsche. Now Mellin has reinvented himself as the Modern Milkman, with a mission to reconnect people with food through the use of technology. He started the business in 2018 and, thanks not least to lockdown, now has over 200 employees and 100,000 customers and has saved upwards of 53,000 wheelie bins of plastic. He has offices in Leeds, Manchester, London and Lille, which is where he is when we hook up over Zoom.

Mellin “grew up around food”, just outside of Burnley. His dad became a butcher because he didn’t think there was a future in farming, but when Simon left school at 16 he didn’t think there was much future in being a butcher, which is why he became a mechanic instead. Each learned their trade through traditional apprenticeships. It took Simon three years, on a weekly wage of £80, with one day a week in college. Evenings and weekends he would hang out at local race meetings, handing out his CV and touting for work. Eventually he managed to get in with ABG Motor Sport in Runcorn, and into British GT, and “that was the start of my career”.