Engineering the authentic thing

Related tags Ready meals Meal Food Indian cuisine

Adrian Harding trained as a chemical engineer and is now implementing world class manufacturing and 'just-in-time' practices

I’ve been here for three and a half years. That’s probably the longest I’ve stayed in any post since I started my food career with RHM as a graduate trainee. Since then I’ve worked for Sun Valley Poultry, Mayhew Chicken, Kerry Foods, Northern Foods and Hazlewood.

The good thing about this job is that my role changes constantly. In a big company it’s harder to achieve that, and you can get bored. Also, my previous roles have all been in production. Here it’s operations, so I’m involved in everything.

The Authentic Food Company started in Stockport in 1985, making Indian products for foodservice - mainly snacks, like samosas and onion bhajis, and ready meals. Since then it’s added other cuisines - Oriental, Tex-Mex and Mediterranean - but the emphasis is still very much on the ‘authentic’.

We cook sauces using a traditional, brat-pan method and have qualified production chefs, experienced in preparing Indian or Chinese foods. If we do bring in any non-Indians chefs we send them to do an NVQ in catering and hospitality, and Kamal Basran, who started the company with her husband Lak, will always get involved in their training too. By the time I joined in 2002 turnover had reached about £6m. Then, because there was more business coming in than the original factory could handle, production was split up. Snacks and starters stayed in Stockport but all ready meals were moved to this new unit in Sharston. That’s why I was brought in. I had experience of ready meal production in big companies and knew a lot about capacity planning. Within two months, turnover went from £6m to the equivalent of about £14m. They needed someone who could plan operations on a daily, weekly, monthly and annual basis.

I also had to recruit a team to help us move on. At that time, for example, we had a technical director who doubled as the engineering manager. Now we’ve put a proper engineering team in place as well as production managers and quality assurance managers at each site. We operate ‘real’ quality assurance. We don’t have a quality control department. All the guys have personal responsibility for hitting their department’s EFSIS food safety standards and targets.

It’s not a ‘process’ here. We don’t have machines programmed to deposit butter, onions, spices and meat then cook for a pre-set time. We’ve got a bank of brat pans that are all hand-stirred by the chefs, so they really have to know what they’re doing. Also, we blanch our vegetables separately, then stir them into the finished sauces, rather than cooking them all together. It gives a much better texture.

Everything is on positive release. We make sauces one day for filling the next, and nothing goes into high-care for assembly until a chef signs off the batch. We check the viscosity, using a consistometer, and we have a lady working in high-care who tastes every batch again before it’s filled. That’s on top of our routine taste panels. So there are four or five overlapping stages where sauces are checked before assembly.

I look after both factories but I operate from Sharston by virtue of its relative size and turnover. We’re doing about 300,000 ready meal units a week here, in multi-foil catering trays, CPET (crystalline polyethylene terephthalate) trays or pouches.

We’ve got about 65 hourly-paid staff in Sharston and 45 at the other site. Stockport will do about 450,000 bhajis, pakoras or other snacks a week and is quite labour-intensive. For example, we make samosas in a very authentic way, by hand-wrapping. A couple of years ago we raised production from 15,000 to 63,000 units a week there. That did involve a bit of automation but it was mainly achieved by taking on more people.

There’s more automation in Sharston, although it’s still pretty flexible. We’ve got four production lines in high-care, assembling dishes like Thai Red Duck Curry and Panang Chicken Curry. Three are semi-automatic, with a lot of hand filling in different formats. The fourth is fully automatic, with auto-depositors and tray-sealing technology. Two thirds of what we do goes into CPET trays.

We’ve spent nearly £2m on capital equipment since moving here but we’re always looking for more technical innovation. For example, on the semi-automatic lines we currently use manual tray-sealers that require two operators per line. I’m looking at replacing those with automatic Proseals.

We mostly make to sales order requirements - we only keep seven to 10 days’ stock in the system - but because we’re mainly frozen we can do reasonable runs. We’re not doing 120 of this and 130 of that like some of the chilled manufacturers. Having said that, we do produce some chilled meals for leading pub chains - mainly chicken tikka masala. All our products are cooled to 3°C after cooking anyway, so for pub chains we just assemble them and push them straight through to packing, rather than putting them through the spiral freezer.

Running two sites can be a bit of an issue because you can’t be in two places at once. But because we manage through KPIs (key performance indicators) it’s really not that difficult. Measures like cases per hour and direct labour usage are controlled on a daily basis. Also, we have a ‘remote desktop’ system now, which means I can literally run the factory from home if necessary. We’ve got cameras in both factories that I can view from my desktop. It’s not a ‘Big Brother’ thing; it’s just very helpful.

The challenges are around people more than anything else, so we focus very much on our staff. This year we came 50th in The Sunday Times ‘best small companies to work for’. We’re constantly working with our employees, giving them development opportunities, putting them through NVQs. We also have a ‘positive action’ team, which has its own budget and organises various events, from charity marathons to bowling nights, a trip to Chester Zoo, Cadbury World and five-a-side football.

We have to be very good trainers because we have so many nationalities here and many don’t speak English. You can’t just ‘tell’ staff, you actually have to demonstrate it to them. That’s why we have so many visual aids around the building, like colour coding of floors, and shadow boards to show them where tools should be hung. It’s the whole ‘keep it simple’ thing and a lot of it comes from world class manufacturing and Kanban (just-in-time deliveries).

One of the first things I did when I came here was introduce English lessons. It helps that we’ve got an owner who speaks Urdu and Punjabi, and a lot of our chefs can communicate in Hindi. Polish and Slovakian are the big challenges now - and I’m working on that. But what we really need is a universal language.

Other firms say they have trouble recruiting, and it’s true if you only want to employ John Smith, who speaks English and has been in the food industry for 20 years. He doesn’t exist any more. But we’re much more accepting of that. We’ll take on people who don’t speak English and work with them for two or three years. We just take a very positive view.

PERSONAL

Name: Adrian Harding

Age: 39

Career highlights: Joined RHM's graduate training scheme in 1988 with a Masters in Chemical Engineering from Leeds University. Held a variety of production management posts at Sun Valley, Kerry and Northern Foods before joining Hazlewood in 1997 as factory manager and manufacturing manager. Spent another two years at Northern before joining The Authentic Food Co in 2002

Domestics: moved to Wrexham in 1996 and commutes daily

Outside work: "My wife Janice and three kids Faye, Frazer and Morgan are my hobby, as my son plays within the academy system and my daughter runs for Great Britain and is currently studying at Loughborough University