The financial crisis may be biting but there’s still an appetite for delicious artisan fare. Five foodie entrepreneurs with flourishing businesses reveal their ingredients for success
YORKSHIRE PROVENDER
Belinda Williams, 46
'My ambition is to continue to prove that the big boys don't always muscle out the little people,' says Belinda
I am a farmer’s daughter and cooked as a child. I then became a cordon bleu cook and travelled the world, cooking on yachts and for the racehorse owner Robert Sangster.
After I met my husband Terry, we returned to England and founded The Yorkshire Party Company near Ripon, catering for private events. All our catering work is in summer – when we often do six weddings a weekend – but we have a hole in our income in winter. So in 2004 I started Yorkshire Provender using the Party Company’s kitchen.
I wanted to create a palette of colourful soups to tempt adults, the way pots of Play-Doh tempt children. The first soup I made was Beetroot, Ginger and Horseradish, which is bright crimson. I don’t have a food manufacturing background, so I didn’t consider adding preservatives, gums, thickeners and stabilisers – I just used fresh vegetables and herbs. I sent the soup to a show in London, where Selfridges saw it, rang and said, ‘Do you have a bar code?’ I didn’t even have a saucepan yet! Yorkshire Provender began to fly before I’d thought the whole thing through.
Other soup manufacturers use frozen, pre-prepared veg for consistency of price and ease of process. Our secret is that we peel our own vegetables. I learned my lesson at the start, when I bought from a chap who said, ‘If you buy my potatoes, I’ll peel them too.’ He delivered them in buckets, in a liquid I assumed was water. I use potatoes in the beetroot soup, and I couldn’t understand why its crimson colour kept disappearing – it turned out he’d used a whitener to preserve their colour.
After Selfridges, we had orders from Fortnum & Mason and Harrods. Yorkshire Provender was still tiny and nobody wanted to deliver for us, so I had no choice but to climb into a van at 5am and drive to London. Now we are also in Sainsbury’s, Waitrose, Booths and independent shops, and a wholesaler makes the deliveries.
Our soups are made like they would be at home for a dinner party. I’ve taught the 24 people who work for me to cook properly, so that ingredients are added at the correct point, not just chucked in and forgotten about. Overcooking reduces the quality in all sorts of ways.
It was the Party Company that allowed me to grow Yorkshire Provender, but the soup has more potential. My ambition is to continue to prove that the big boys don’t always muscle out the little people. If you stick to your principles and produce something better than anything else in the market, there will be a place for it.
yorkshireprovender.co.uk, tel: 01765 641920
HEAD IN THE CLOUDS
Lynn Bolton, 52
'Customers come via word of mouth or find me at fairs,' says Lynn
In 2008, I was running my own conference and event management company. As we headed into recession, I knew that the first thing to stop would be the conferences I organised for IT companies. So, if I didn’t build another revenue stream, my cat and I would be on the streets. The question was, what could I do?
My nan had been the household cook for a duch*ess in Chelsea during the First World War and was known for her puddings, especially her meringues. My mum – her eldest daughter – had multiple sclerosis and died when I was 15, so I was cooking and keeping house from a young age. Nan was a huge influence in my life and I decided I wanted to do something with food.
In August 2008 I was in Borough Market in Southeast London, looking for somewhere to have coffee, when I ‘felt’ my mother grab my elbow and say, ‘This way’. We went down an alleyway and there was a tea shop. I sat down with my favourite dessert – lemon meringue pie. That was my eureka moment. I decided I would market Nan’s style of delicious meringues – crumbly on the outside and gooey in the middle. I registered as an artisan business and experimented with different sizes and flavours – even an alcoholic meringue.
I named my business Head in the Clouds and asked the designer of the NatWest logo to create my brand image. I developed 40 flavours – my raspberry and white chocolate meringue is sinful! And I invented a meringue ‘cupcake’ for coeliac customers who can’t eat ordinary cake (meringue is gluten-free). I do all the cooking in the kitchen of my house in Faversham, Kent, with free-range eggs supplied by the nearby farm run by the Royal School for Deaf Children. I can make 500 meringues a day and have been known to start cooking at 7am on a Monday and not go to bed till 11pm on the Tuesday night!
Head in the Clouds meringues has been going for two years now. Customers come via word of mouth or find me at fairs. In 2009, my meringues won Best New Product at the Country Living Fair. Since then we’ve been featured on Sky TV and were runners-up in the Kent 2020 Innovation Awards, judged by Nick Hewer of The Apprentice fame. A friend who’s a qualified chef with a food business in California has now suggested that we work together. So Head in the Clouds is on its way to becoming a worldwide brand.
Sadly, Nan did not live to see the project get under way, but I always say that she’s up there with Mummy directing proceedings.
headintheclouds.uk.com, tel: 07785 225557
RUDE HEALTH
Camilla Barnard, 40
'Our first mix has 23 ingredients - so to make a few tubs we needed 23 sacks and boxes of things,' says Camilla
In 2005 my husband Nick and I realised that we couldn’t find a shop-bought muesli we liked, so we got together with our neighbours in Wandsworth, South London, and created our own mix. We tried it out on the local deli and they said, ‘It’s fantastic, can you deliver more?’
We called ourselves Rude Health, and made the muesli in our kitchen. That was a challenge because our first mix, The Ultimate, has 23 ingredients – so to make a few tubs we needed 23 sacks and boxes of things such as goji berries and nuts.
I had never worked in food – I studied Japanese at university and then went into marketing – and we had no business plan. As Rude Health grew, I realised that we had to completely commit to it, and I gave up marketing. Our neighbours now just have a shareholding.
In 2006, when we were mostly selling online, we discovered that Nigella Lawson was ordering ridiculous quantities of The Ultimate. She asked her local deli to stock Rude Health and wrote about us in a magazine. She even included a recipe Lazy Loaf, made using our muesli, in her book Nigella Express.
The business spiralled. Inspired by customer feed back, I developed a range of porridges with cheeky names such as Fruity Date and Daily Oats, and then I got into cereals, questioning why they are so highly processed and have so much salt.
Now six of us work for Rude Health, and we’ve moved from the kitchen to a warehouse nearby. Our children Emily and Max, aged seven and six, are part of our tasting panel. We have had fantastic support from the Riverford and Abel & Cole organic veg box schemes and are stocked in Waitrose and large Tescos.
My ambition is to make it easy for everyone in the UK to be able to buy a really good cereal. People know they don’t have to read our labels because we only put the right stuff in.
rudehealth.com, tel: 020 8877 9821
DEBBIE & ANDREW'S SAUSAGES
Debbie Keeble, 45
'We started making them at the kitchen table, wrapped them by hand and sold them to the landlord at our local pub,' says Debbie
In 1998 my husband Andrew and I were pig farming near Bedale in Yorkshire. We had just moved the pigs to a new site with a fox-proof fence when a hot-air balloon flying too low made them stampede. A lot of sows lost their litters and we no longer had a productive herd. With four children to provide for, I realised we had to do something different. Andrew knew how to make sausages, so I thought, ‘Right, sausages it is!’
We started making them at the kitchen table, wrapped them by hand and sold them to the landlord at our local pub, The Nag’s Head.
Traditionally, sausages are made with butchers’ leftovers. Because we are not butchers, we came at it from a different angle. We only use lean shoulder pork from farms where we know pigs are kept to the right standards, which is the quality of a Sunday roast, and never use frozen meat. We stick to fresh ingredients and don’t overpower the flavour of the pork with too much seasoning.
To sell to shops, we took a unit on an industrial estate and got the required food certificates and a machine to wrap the sausages. At first we had about 200 customers; now we supply four of the big supermarkets and sell 100,000 packets a week.
We have six varieties of sausage and employ 30 people. Now the children are older, I put them to good use: Jamie, 21, works full time in the business and Guy, 19, Roddy, 17, and Ellie, 16, help in the holidays, selling sausages at shows and events around the country.
When we first started, my dream was to have enough money to take the children on holiday, but now I’d like Debbie & Andrew’s to become the UK’s best-loved sausages! People watch scaremongering programmes about sausages and think, ‘I’m never going to eat one again.’ But we make sausages people can trust.
debbieandandrews.co.uk, tel: 0800 783 6481
HIGGIDY
Camilla Stephens, 40
Camila has 150 people working for her and has recently started a profit-sharing scheme
I disappointed my parents by leaving school in the middle of my A-levels and going to Leiths to learn to cook. I have been working with food ever since. In the early 2000s I worked for a large company, developing granola bars and muffins for Starbucks, but I missed doing the actual cooking, so I left.
A friend suggested making pies. I’d seen small start-up brands emerge such as Green & Black’s chocolate and Innocent smoothies and thought, ‘Why not?’ So, backed by two investors, I built a small production facility in Shoreham-by-Sea, Sussex. We called ourselves The Little Higgidy Kitchen and produced hand-made pies on a farmer’s-market scale.
This was in 2003, the year I met my husband James. After six months, I sold my flat in London, James sold his house in Oxford, and we bought out the investors and put all our money into Higgidy. We have only just started making a profit, so we are still living in a rented house. Our children Kate and Jack are aged four and two and a half, and it’s been a crazy time growing a business and a family.
Originally, we had two Higgidy pies – Beef, Stilton and Ale and Spinach, Feta and Toasted Pine Nut. We now have 15, which sell in Sainsbury’s, Waitrose, Budgens and Booths, and lunch-box packs at larger Boots stores. Our packaging, which is 100 per cent recyclable, is feminine and that’s deliberate. There are plenty of pies aimed at men and, because mums and wives often do the shopping, I wanted to appeal to women. So when they said, ‘I bought your Beef, Stilton and Ale pie, but I want something smaller and lighter for myself,’ I developed vegetarian quiches and tarts, which are now a huge part of our business.
With her little helpers Jack (left) and Kate
Our meat is always British, our chicken and bacon Freedom Food approved, and our eggs are free range. Because our products are all hand-made and we sell tens of thousands a day, we have 150 people working for us. They are many nationalities – Polish, German, Sri Lankan, Czech, South African, Kenyan and Turkish. We train them and arrange for them to learn English if they want to. I believe passionately in paying people well, and we have recently started a profit-sharing scheme.
It’s important that everyone feels part of the Higgidy family, so every September we all go, with our partners and children, to a farm in the country where we have a barbecue, play games and celebrate having made it through another year!
higgidy.co.uk, tel: 01273 446830
