Phil Ugalde, md, Proper Cornish Food Company
Pasties are a very emotive subject in Cornwall. You grow up with them. As a result, everyone has their own favourite way of making them and everyone thinks they are an expert, and my family is no exception! My grandmother made them, my aunties made them, my mother made them, and so on. It's all part of your heritage if you grow up around here.
Having said that, it wasn't my original plan to go into the food industry; I spent my first five years after school studying to be an agricultural engineer and then ended up working as a mechanic in the motor trade.
Years later, I kind of stumbled into the food industry. The pasty business actually started as a van sales operation. I bought in my pasties and sold them on to pubs, corner shops and restaurants in and around Cornwall, but the business grew very quickly and I realised I might be on to something.
Why did it succeed? Looking back, it was just blind faith. I knew how I liked my Cornish pasties and I couldn't imagine anyone else wanting them any other way. I was selling a really high quality, hand-crimped cut steak product that took the pasty right back to its roots at a time when the quality of pasties in general had really gone down as the market had become so price-driven.
Customers really bought into what I was doing and things grew so quickly that I realised the next step would involve making them myself. It was at this point that I hooked up with two other Cornishmen, Chris and Dave Pauling, who I met through a mutual friend, and the business really started to take off.
Stand and deliver!
We rented a tiny ex-café from one of my customers to make our pasties. We were rolling all our pastry by hand and struggling to make just a few hundred pasties a day without any industrial equipment. It was pretty hard work at the start. We were flat out, doing 18-hour days in order to deliver on our promises to customers. If we said we'd deliver it, we'd darn well deliver it, without fail.
Anyway, it soon became clear that we needed to move into larger premises and we were able take over one of the units here at Lucknow Road, Bodmin, in 1990. Since then, we've taken over half of the units on the estate. We now make 50-55,000 pasties a day, compared to the 1,000 or so we were making then!
But it was really tough in the early days. We nearly lost the business at one stage. However, we did get lucky because quite early on, one of our competitors went out of business and we were able to buy a factory full of equipment at a knock-down price.
While we now have one automated line with a depositor for products like slices and sausage rolls, most of our pasties are hand-made, which is very labour intensive. At the moment, we just run one shift, Monday to Friday, and we're trying to drive as much efficiency as we can in order to delay incurring the expense of moving to two shifts for as long as possible.
On a typical day, the pastry people come in around 4am and start preparing the pastry, which is rolled into discs ready for pasty production. I'd say the pastry is probably the most challenging part of the operation: depending on the weather, we are constantly having to alter the temperature at which we store our raw materials so the pastry is at just the right temperature for hand-crimping.
Then the vegetable guys come in around 4-4.30am and start preparing the fresh veg before the recipe people arrive around 6.30am and start mixing up the fillings. When these are ready, swede, potatoes, onion and cut steak are hand-deposited and layered onto the pastry discs and hand-crimped. They are then either frozen for customers to cook on their own premises, or cooked and sold chilled and ready to eat for customers like Sainsbury and Spar. Because about two-thirds of our business is frozen with a 12-18-month shelf-life, we can build up some stock in quieter times and try and smooth out production over the year to counteract the seasonality in the business. Most of the pasties are 283g, but we do make a 510g giant steak, which is a bit of a mouthful!
While the phrase 'hand-made' is obviously key to our brand, it's not meaningless marketing puff; it genuinely makes a difference. For example, many depositing machines squash up the contents, whereas you need quite a loose filling with a traditional steak pasty.
We've been doing a lot to increase productivity. Most of this is through improving communications. Every day we have a 10am meeting where we go over key performance indicators. Did we meet the plan? If not, why not? Our volumes are still going up, but as with the whole of the baking industry, margins are under pressure because of rapidly rising input prices so we are going to have to look again at our pricing structure. We know it's tough for our customers as well, but there comes a point where you can't keep absorbing higher costs.
As for capital investment, we've got lots of irons in the fire, but the biggest one at the moment is deciding whether to install a biodigestor to turn our waste into energy. We've also been talking to other people on the industrial estate about whether we can offer them a service. We're also looking at new packaging equipment and another oven, although nothing has been decided yet.
So what makes a good Cornish pasty? We make all sorts, from chicken balti to pork and apple, but the biggest selling line is our traditional steak pasty, made with locally produced swede, potato, onion and cut steak, carefully seasoned with good quality salt and pepper.
As for the pastry, there are lots of different views. Some people think it should be short crust and very tough, but we've pioneered a rougher puff pastry, which is robust enough to hold the product together, but also has a soft eating quality. This has been so successful that virtually all of our competitors have copied us!
We see a bright future for companies selling regional foods. It's something I am really passionate about. While times are tough, people still want a high quality product and we've seen our turnover rise at least 10% year-on-year for the last few years. This site is on course to turn over about £10M this year, and with Furniss Foods in Redruth, which we bought in 2006, group turnover is about £12M. I can easily see that rising to £15M in two-to-three years.
We are obviously keen to drive the Proper Cornish brand, but having started supplying Sainsbury with its Taste the Difference Cornish Pasties earlier this year, we can see lots of opportunities in own-label as well.
Some people might argue that you could make a decent Cornish pasty in Aberdeen, but you tell that to any passionate Cornishman! I know people can be cynical about the EU protected names scheme [The Cornish Pasty Association has just received news that the UK government is backing its application to gain protected geographical indication (PGI) status for Cornish pasties under EU law], but it was actually set up to help protect regionalised industries and protect the authenticity of regional foods, which I'm all in favour of.
I feel that the PGI is actually rescuing the Cornish pasty. It was starting to become almost generic and I know many Cornish people feel that it's been quietly got at, that the quality has been massaged downwards. Basically, people were putting anything into it and still calling it a Cornish pasty, which is destroying the reputation of a very high quality product we've been producing for years.
It's not about killing off competitors that happen to be outside Cornwall; they can still use the word pasty, they just won't be able to call it Cornish. Of course, if they do want to keep the name, they are very welcome to come to Cornwall and set up their plants here, or they could just buy from Proper Cornish!
FACTORY FACTS
Location: Proper Cornish Food Company, Western House, Lucknow Road, Bodmin, Cornwall, PL31 1EZ.
Tel: 01208 265 830
Products: Cornish pasties, slices, sausage rolls
Employees: 180
Turnover: c£10M (excluding turnover of Furniss Foods in Redruth)
Customers: Compass, Sainsbury, Brakes, Moto, Pasty Presto, BFP, Delice de france and Spar
Annual output: 50-55,000 pasties
a day
PERSONAL
Name: Phil Ugalde
Age: 62
Career highlights: Starting the Cornish pasty business, meeting operations director Chris Pauling and commercial director Jane Flowerdew
Domestics: Has four children with his partner, Bronwyn
Outside work: "I enjoy spending time with my family, camping holidays in the sunshine, and I have a great interest in Formula One racing!"
