The trick is that all the beef, lamb, mutton, geese, seafood, cheeses, biscuits, oatcakes, honey, conserves, wool products and whisky from co-operative members are sold under a single brand, Mey Selections, the logo of which is a print of a watercolour, painted by the Prince, of the castle.
"What we have to do is constantly emphasise quality. Here is an opportunity to rediscover the vital importance of native and traditional breeds."
The idea was inspired by his Duchy Originals range. The difference is that the Prince does not own Mey Selections. His involvement (as a brand developer) stems largely from his desire to protect "the future of family farming" and help focus buyers on a distressed region. Even in the cut-throat world of supermarket economics, the royal imprimatur still grabs attention.
"The Prince's name gives us credibility," says William Calder, the managing director of Scrabster Seafoods. "Mey Selections gives us some selling power against the supermarkets. You can see why the Royal family is very popular in this part of Scotland. We would be much worse off without them."
Sainsbury's is Mey Selections' sole multiple retailer. It says: "Mey Selections has been popular with our customers. Over the past three years the brand has experienced growth of more than 60 per cent year-on-year in our stores, and over 13 million Sainsbury's customers have bought its products from us.
As consumers increasingly feel the pinch on their household budgets and dine out less, the demand for high quality food to cook at home is strong. With Mey Selections, customers can have restaurant-quality meals at home."
Were the Prince not heir to the throne, he would make an effective director of Greenpeace. From the delights of Scottish beef, he moves on seamlessly to the broader challenges of tourism, the landscape, buildings and waste management.
In the City, globalisation is a buzzword with positive implications for growth and profit. In the Castle of Mey, it carries a different connotation. "With globalisation there's a real danger," says the Prince, "of everything being homogenised to the point where nobody knows where you are."
At the heart of Mey Selections is sustainability (music to the Prince's ears). The ingredients have to be sourced within 100 miles of the castle. Its promotions boast: "Natural, environmentally-friendly methods of farming, fishing and production are supported by the company's commitment to a supply chain which has minimal impact on its suroundings."
Yes, yes, I say. But isn't this trying to turn back the clock? It's a nice thought that we might be able to feed the poor from family-run units where the animals live like residents at the Ritz, but in the real world Old MacDonald's Farm has come and gone. The solution, surely, is mass production?
At this point, something snaps; the Prince can take no more. Throughout our conversation he has been calm, measured and disinclined to rubbish the supermarket chains which, I suspect, he regards as doers of the devil's work, turning Cotswold villages into miserable clone towns.
But my suggestion that Big Food, industrial-scale operators, are the way ahead sends him whizzing off piste. Jabbing his finger at me, he lets rip: "What, all run by gigantic corporations? Is that really the answer? I think not. That would be the absolute destruction of everything and... the classic way of ensuring that there is no food in the future."
Bouncing in his chair, the Prince sets out his nightmare vision, a world in which millions of small farmers "are driven off their land [by global conglomerates] into unsustainable, unmanageable, degraded and dysfunctional conurbations of unmentionable awfulness".
If that's how it's going to be, he says, "count me out". We are missing the point. We should be discussing "food security not food production".
Without naming names, he goes after the "clever" genetic engineers who have put us on course for the "biggest disaster environmentally of all time". We should be working, he says, "with Nature.
We have gone working against Nature for too long." But these corporate monsters have engaged in "an experiment that's gone seriously wrong, causing untold problems which become very expensive and very difficult to undo". Monsanto, I imagine, will not be on his Christmas drinks list.
You may not agree with the Prince, but it's hard to fault his passion. He cites India's Punjab where the so-called green revolution, involving hybrid seeds and grains that demand huge quantities of water, has led to a collapse in the water table. And in Western Australia, he claims, there are huge salinisation problems, "through excessive approaches to modern forms of agriculture".
On my way back from the castle, I stop off in rural Caithness for lunch with one of Mey Selections' founding farmers, Danny Miller. The scheme has transformed his prospects. Almost all his livestock is sold through Mey Selections, giving him a three-to-four per cent price uplift on lamb and five-to-six per cent on beef.
Unsurprisingly, he is a big fan of the Prince: "Mey Selections offers me a future that I once thought would not be possible. I truly believe we are going to be a global brand. That's not living in the world of dreams."
That night in the hotel bar, I spot a bottle of Barrogill whisky. It's a blend of five malts from local distilleries and is sold under the Mey Selections banner. I order a large one and toast the Prince. Britain would be duller without him...
@ The Prince of Wales: 'If that is the future, count me out' - Telegraph:
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