Manufacturing Part 1

Falling in love with manufacturing. 

It’s not a story you hear very often from business owners in the artisan food world. To generalise, the narrative goes,

‘Once upon a time, we fell in love with making ………….(bread, jam, cheese) we used the traditional methods utilising ……….(wood fired ovens, stove top copper pans, hand milking) and carried on doing this without development or finessing for ever and ever. The End.’

Indeed, it’s not where our minds were when we began a kitchen sink business, making jam from home all week, selling in farmers’ markets at the weekend. But to be sustainable we had to grow and bit by bit we have built a small factory.

Especially as a woman, this isn’t a world that I had anticipated entering however have found to be incredibly stimulating and hugely satisfying. In one production run you can feel like you are wrestling with the equipment all the way, but in others you become one with the machine. Either way it is still satisfying that at the end of a loud, intense production run, you have all these beautiful products that are stable, and sparkling clean and you know are going to delight the people that eat them.

We need to embrace this part of food production and start to talk about how intensification of production doesn’t have to mean a drop in quality. This is also how poor manufacturers can be held to account. Are you making something with poor quality, unhealthy ingredients? Then why? Especially with growing awareness of how damaging food can be for people’s welfare.

And in closing, hug a machine, they’re extremely helpful and quite often under appreciated.