Dressed to impress

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Me & My Factory : John Davis

My business partner Clive Barker Tucker is a career head chef and until three years ago I was a hotelier. It was when I worked for the Metropole Group that I first came across the lack of high-quality ready-to-use meal accompaniments -- chutneys, dressing and sauces -- for large-scale banqueting.

If we wanted to serve, say, a foie gras terrine with a pineapple and cracked pepper chutney, we could never find anything on the market that was of restaurant quality. We had to make everything ourselves.

In the 1990s I branched out on my own, and took over the Old Ship, Brighton's oldest hotel. And I had exactly the same problem. If we needed a red onion marmalade, for example, it would have to be made in our kitchens. That meant employing more chefs, and they're in short supply.

I first came across Clive when he tendered to provide the catering at Brighton Marina Yacht Club, where I sailed. I put the idea to him of producing high quality meal accompaniments, and, as a chef, he saw a great market for them.

So we started looking for premises. We found this unit on an industrial estate on the outskirts of Hastings. It was affordable -- and there was a lot of labour around. Two factories had just closed locally so we were able to pick up some of their staff.

It was an empty unit when we took it over in 2001, and we just equipped it with the basics because we didn't really know what direction we would take. At first we were just producing banqueting dishes for hotels to give us some turnover. Then we got talking to Alpha Flight Services, who asked us to bring some innovation to British Airways' Club Class salad dressings. We came up with a 12ml bottle format, which they were very keen on, and suddenly we were producing 50,000 units a week for them.

So that was when we stopped being just an extension of someone's hotel kitchen and had to start thinking as food manufacturers. We had to go large-scale and we had to mechanise quickly.

Both Clive and I were pretty skilled in hotel systems, including HACCP, but we didn't know about manufacturing process control. When BA started asking about accreditation we decided to take professional advice, and talked to CMI Consulting, who really set us off on the right road. They explained the documentary evidence we needed to go forward and they recommended the BRC standard.

They also stressed the importance of process separation and siting each operation in the right place before we got too far down the road. That was when we decided to take on two of the adjoining factory units so we could get everything in a line, from goods-inwards to despatch.

We've now got 929m2of space. We're only using about 40% of our capacity, but if we had to move we could just replicate exactly what we've got here under a bigger roof because all the processes are spot on.

Then it was about finding machinery to produce a 12ml bottle with a cork, and we chose Adelphi Packaging Machinery. They're an English company with high levels of engineering skill and good back-up. They designed a monobloc machine to fill and cork, which was then built by TGM in Italy.

One thing I have been disappointed in, coming from hotels and restaurants, is the sheer length of time it takes to get machinery. With the exception of Adelphi, we're continually quoted three to four months, which is far too long.

In 2002 we won an innovation award for our 12ml bottle. We're still producing it for BA but it's now exported to in-flight operators in Holland and Greece too, and it's in hotel room-service including the US-based One to One Group, which is five-star-plus. And we're making something like 30 different flavours, including lemongrass and coriander -- usually called Thai dressing -- rocket pesto and Parmesan cream.

The process for dressings is fairly simple. For a balsamic vinaigrette, for example, we buy in the oil and vinegar in 1,000 litre intermediate bulk containers (IBCs). It's cold mixed and then filled and corked on the line. We also use a lot of fresh herbs, which we buy from France. But the key things are that we can make small batches -- anything from 25 or 50 litres up to 1,000 litres; we can react very quickly to short orders, and we can develop dressings and flavours that you won't find on a supermarket shelf. It's more akin to what sits on a restaurant menu.

From the outset we've also made things like chutneys and salsas but it was the dressings that got us into manufacturing-proper. With chutneys, our point of difference there is that we cook using hotel equipment, except we've scaled it up. We've had two 240-litre brat pans, with full temperature control, made for us in France. Most hotel brat pans are more like 50 litres but the principle is the same.

Every bit of the product touches a heated surface during the cooking. It means you can caramelise red onions just like in a hotel kitchen and, because the pans are open, they will evaporate water, which takes the wetness out.

A lot of people have tried to sell us closed cooking vessels, but those give you watery chutney that bleeds on the plate when you spoon it out. Most vessels also have mechanised stirrers but we've got human stirrers. Clive has recruited a team of eight chefs from AA rosette restaurants to handle our kitchen operations. For consistency, they've got written procedures, and they test for viscosity and pH at given times. But these guys are hotel chefs, not manufacturing labour. They know what they're doing.

Our first chutneys were all chilled. Then we talked to CMI about going ambient to give us a bit more flexibility in production, and that led to the process we've got now. We pump straight from the brat pan, via a metal detector, onto a depositor line, filling standard 1.25kg cold-blown plastic jars. They're induction heat-sealed, cooled with water and labelled.

Because we're hot filling and induction sealing we get a one-year shelf-life without pasteurising, which is what manufacturers have to do when they pack in glass. If you're reheating the product in something like an autoclave and then cooling it again, you're going to get a lot of moisture and breakdown of the whole fruit or vegetables.

Most processors would end up with a slop. Our method gives much better quality -- products like our pineapple chutney or Mediterranean vegetable chutney have got a definite crunch -- but our packaging is keeping us off supermarket shelves. I've asked retailers why glass is king and they say it's just what the consumer wants. But we're mainly selling to chefs, who can't have glass in the kitchen.

We do use 250ml glass -- unpasteurised -- for samples, and they look great, but we're not prepared to heat those jars up and cool them down again, just to satisfy the retailer.

We've put some of our dressings and vinaigrettes in kitchen-safe 250ml PET bottles with pouring caps. We're doing a new range of 15ml ?dipper pots' for foodservice. And we also do stick-pack sachets for airlines, which use the same quality dressings but aimed at the economy market.

We use a Sancko single-lane machine to pack those. It was the right price, but it was also simple and ?get-at-able'. If you've got a vertical form-fill-seal machine and you're playing around with olive oil and balsamic vinegar and the machine goes slightly wrong, you suddenly hear these frying sounds ... and these machines are a bastard to clean!

We run an Amcor film on the Sancko, which has enabled us to offer six- or even eight-colour printing. So, with products like creamy dill dressing, we're really bringing a new dimension to stick packs. And we expect to expand on to a Stick Pack Europe five-lane machine in due course.

But we definitely don't want to go down the commodity route.

personal

Name: John Davis

Age: 45

Career highlights: Gained a degree in hotel management and trained for a year in Switzerland before joining the Metropole Group, where he worked in Birmingham and London. Took a 40% stake in Brighton's Old Ship Hotel and ran it for six years before forming B&DFL with Clive Barker Tucker in 2001.

Domestics: Married with three kids, and living in Hythe, Kent

Outside work: Passionate about food -- and sailing. Holds a race record of 7h 20mins for the sea route from Brighton to Facamp in France, and is currently teaching his children to sail.