I was delighted to be invited along as a guest of the BBC Food Programme to their Food and Farming Awards last week during the BBC Good Food Show. I joined last year’s winner in the Producer of The Year category (and new client!) Alex Gooch in the Supertheatre where the Food Programme’s Sheila Dillon did a fabulous job of hosting and compering the awards. We caught up after the event and looking forward to lunch in January! Introduced Alex to Adam Henson of BBC Countryfile, suspect with shared passion for great ingredients and baking they’ll be meeting again.

Adam Henson from BBC Countryfile and Alex Gooch, artisan baker

BBC Food and Farming Awards

Sitting just behind the likes of Rick Stein, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Giorgio Locatelli, Richard Corrigan, James Martin and Valentine Warner we watched a succession of amazing, inspirational individuals and groups being recognised for their hard work and enterprise and receiving awards from this esteemed front row! Great to see our pal broadcaster and man behind British Street Food Awards Richard Johnson up there too.

Find out more about the winners and listen again to the Awards on the BBC site..

We’ve known and admired the work of Emma Jones and Enterprise Nation for some time and pleased to hear from her at a meeting last week that she’s getting the message over at the highest level including taking to the stage at the Conservative Party Conference recently.

Together with Country Living Magazine she has just published ‘Turn Your Talent Into A Business’, aimed at anyone who has a passion, skill, hobby and an interest in turning it into a business.

We were asked to recommend a case study from foodie sector and passed on artisan baker Alex Gooch who has briefed us to develop his branding, web and ecommerce and help accelerate growth of his business and generally spread The Real Bread message!

We are also very pleased that Emma is getting behind the Food Funnel!

food funnel

It’s been a busy few months and only going to get busier I sense!

A new website is being created and will feature much more detail than currently but below is a brief overview for now!!

Firstly, we’ve welcomed four new folks on-board. We’re really pleased to be working with Rob Iles. Rob has twenty years experience in both branded and private label food businesses and has held various sales and marketing roles with the likes of Whitbread, Dairy Crest and Greencore. For the last eight years he a has been Sales and Marketing Director of Buckingham Foods and then Group Innovations and Marketing Director of private equity backed Adelie Foods. Adelie supply sandwiches (lots of ‘em!), salads and snack foods to customers such as Sainsburys, Boots, Costa, Compass Group and a number of airlines.

He joins us to work alongside Mark Glynne-Jones and Dave Lawrence to develop The Food Funnel, an exciting new venture. Essentially, Food  Funnel is a virtual and real-time community of emergent artisan food, drink and lifestyle companies alongside an eclectic mix of foodie partisans in the guise of journalists, chefs, restaurateurs and others. It will act as a conduit for building and maintaining a relationship network primarily in the form of an online platform and occasional gatherings in the real world including seminars, safaris, dinners, events, mentoring sessions etc

The matrix provides a range of business building services for artisan members on a three-tiered basis, essentially REVIEW, RESTYLE, RELAUNCH. We will facilitate interaction with Food Funnel and larger food and drink companies keen to keep abreast of trends, opportunities and threats but in a totally new and we believe, unique way.

We are very excited to be working with a growing number of businesses already including a fabulous artisan baker who is Radio 4 Food Programme’s Producer of The Year to a fourth generation ice cream business based in the Cotswolds.

The other three newcomers are Luke Freeman as Senior Web Developer, Weston Ironside who joins as Senior Designer from Whittards of Chelsea and finally Jenny Lawrence who has joined from a Covent Garden based branding agency with experience of working with brands such as Coke and Diageo.