A bigger slice of the artisan pie

I have been here for three and a half years. Before that I spent 18 years with RHM. I studied chartered accountancy and joined RHM as a finance operations trainee.

I went on to become an IT manager, then went into operations. I ran two manufacturing sites and took the position of head of retail operations for RHM Retail's 300 retail outlets, which became Cooks the Bakery. When that happened, it moved out of manufacturing and became a purely retail-based company and I joined Edward Moon Proper Pies, which is one of two Oliver James Foods sites.

Oliver James was co-founded 20 years ago by Kevin Morel and Martyn Thomas. They started with a unit in London, then moved to the Midlands and set up a company called Thomas Morel Foods. They ended up selling that to Unilever, but then bought it back and renamed it after their sons: Oliver and James.

We bought the Edward Moon Proper Pies site four years ago and it became a pastry and baking site where we also make lasagne.

Morel and Thomas had worked in three-star Michelin restaurants. Their challenge was to make that commercial. That's why I got involved, because the business was still running like a small company and couldn't do it any more. Saying that, we have to take on board 'pots and pans' thinking. We cook at home for each other and bring in our own food to sample. We're not food snobs, but we have enthusiasm for it.

Kevin learned the French process of sous-vide [slow cooking in airtight plastic bags] as a chef to the Roux Brothers. It preserves flavours you might lose in other processes. We are able to commercialise it on a bigger scale and it's carried on at our other site in Redditch, which supplies fillings for us as well as making ready meals. As a business, it's likely we have made more sous-vide meals in the past 20 years than anybody else in the UK.

Our mission is to produce safe, high-quality food that reflects the personalities of the chefs involved. We don't try to replicate standard products. We want our food to be inspirational and unique. We aim to make real food that reflects what people would cook at home or in a restaurant.

Most of our food is bespoke. We supply large pub and restaurant chains such as Mitchells & Butlers. Most change their menus twice a year to 'light night' and 'dark night' options. As soon as we complete one, we start on the other.

We do a lot by hand to achieve consistency, so if we're making a stew, for example, we insert bay leaves and weigh shallots by hand and for our steak and ale pie we count in button mushrooms. We can do large hand-topped steak and ale or chicken pies. Meat and sauce is weighed in and spread by hand. We have made a lot of hand-finished pies for the added value end of the market recently.

We have five development chefs across both sites constantly churning the product range, so we're voracious in terms of development.

Our pies are mainly driven by the traditional favourites, but we're launching pig cheeks in Aspall Cyder with one high street pub chain. Heston Blumenthal's new London restaurant Dinner has launched some old English recipe pies and I think that may well be a trend we may see for 'light nights': going back to traditional English foods. We're seeing Tewkesbury mustard and chicken pies and meat and beer combos. Each pub chain has its own beer that it wants to sell in a pie.

As far as new markets are concerned, the md Martyn Thomas and I have been on an exploratory visit to Eastern Europe and Germany, where a lot of people are into English pubs. Unfortunately, in many areas the supply chain for foodservice is still in its infancy, but it's on our radar.

We're also looking for the right retail partner for the UK market. We are looking to extend the reach of our own-brand products. We have big potential as a business-to-business processor supplying other manufacturers. We want to be able to carry on growing organically, so we're going to have to look at running the factory for longer periods of time more night shifts and weekends and increasing efficiency of equipment.

We have an ongoing investment programme and we have a team working on capacity review. We have been implementing an IT system to manage business for both sites, linking them together. We're using it to manage things such as procurement and stock management. We have a convergence policy, so both sites use the same processes.

We have three lines, one of which is more automated. We have just invested in new chilling and freezing capacity and storage. Our biggest investment has been in our 929m2 storage area. The idea is to centralise goods receipt and storage, so we can deliver to customers on a 'just-in-time' basis.

A year ago we invested in a breading machine, a schnitzling machine and a new oven. We also invested in chilling capability at the back end of last year. We brought in glycol chill-tanks, so we can cool things quicker and in more significant volumes. We also have a new computer system that highlights waste. We used to make round pies, but if you make them square you get no waste from the pastry.

Utility prices and business insurance are among our biggest challenges, but the most significant one is volatility in raw material prices. It's not so much that costs are going up, but that they are volatile. Agreeing on price is dangerous and it's hard to manage and be competitive. For us it's all about protein price. The price of beef and pork is going up and in some cases that's 90%of the product cost.

Supply is another issue. Jamie Oliver recently led a TV programme on corn fed chicken and the next day we couldn't get any. The supermarkets had bought it all up and we still had to deliver a six-month contract.

Gary Davies is general manager of Oliver James Foods' pie factory.

Factory Facts​

Location: Edward Moon Proper Pies, Kineton Road Industrial Estate, 1 Kineton Road, Southam, CV47 0DRStaff: 35, plus 515 agency staff, as required

Factory size: 743.2m2

Operating hours: 6am-10pm

Products: Hand-finished pies, quiches, lasagne, baked desserts and sweet and savoury tarts for foodservice customers

Ouput: 110,000 portions a week

Annual turnover: £3.8M

Personal​

Name: Gary Davies
Age: 48

Career highlights: "I have been involved in several site relocations, which is always incredibly challenging. In one case I was also in charge of putting in a new IT system for the Millennium, which took a couple of years. I also helped to lead the manufacturing operation for Cooks The Bakery chain through the transition from corporate to entrepreneurial ownership. It was a massive culture change."

Domestics: "I'm a single parent, with a 16-year-old daughter."

Outside work: "I like exercising at the gym, playing racket sports and going cycling. I ran a half-marathon last year and a friend and I are walking the whole of the Pennine Way in sections. We both wanted to do it before we turned 50."