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Chef Paul Durbin set up Loxton Foods in the late 1980s and now uses sous-vide technology to supply restaurant quality food to foodservice outlets

PAUL DURBIN, MD, LOXTON FOODS

To begin with, we don't call this a factory. We call it a kitchen. That's a point I push for marketing purposes -- but it also happens to be true.

I spent 10 years as a chef in Michelin-starred restaurants before I set up Loxton Foods. I don't have any outside shareholders or venture capitalists telling me what to do, and when a business is controlled by a 'foodie' it has to make a difference to the culture, doesn't it?

Okay, I want to make money, because I want to secure the future for my family. But I want to do it by producing restaurant-quality foods. The challenge is doing that in a standardised way so you can make larger batches without losing quality. That's what fascinates me and I still get a kick out of it.

I started this business from home, cooking in the back of my house. Then I spent four or five years in a converted barn, gathering staff as I went along. We moved to Whitehill Industrial Estate in Stockport in 1998, and this time we did it full whack: we created a purpose-built food environment and had BRC Higher Level accreditation within about six weeks of opening.

We now produce 80,000 prepared meals a week, all frozen and all going into foodservice. We'll turn over about £5.2m this year. Our market covers restaurant groups, pub groups, airports and ferries, and hotels. We're doing quite a lot of top-end stuff like conferences and banqueting. Obviously we wouldn't get into a Gordon Ramsay-style restaurant but we're into most of the key foodservice players.

We do a cross-section of dishes from top-end products to lunchtime 'pub meals', but we really focus on the premium end. Unless you're a big ready meals producer you can't survive just selling bog-standard commodity products. Our view was, and still is, that we need to create something a little bit special or we'll lose out every time. But often, if we're already supplying something like braised rack of lamb or stuffed fillet of salmon and the customer learns to trust us, we'll get their more commodity, chilli con carne-type business too.

When we moved here we had 30 staff, a turnover of £1.5m and a very loose management structure -- not the 65 staff and the levels of management we have now. Moving gave us the capacity to reach £7.5m-£8m in sales. Although it was a big leap, it gave us some longevity on this site and substantial potential for growth.

We've grown very much within our means. But the critical thing, three or four years ago, was our decision to enter the sous-vide market. Before that we were producing meals by the traditional method: cook the meat or fish, use the stock to make a sauce, prepare the other ingredients, then bring them back together at the end. Our point of difference was -- and still is -- that we use stocks made from the protein. We don't just assemble a meal using a sauce that has never seen the meat it's going to go with.

Now, over 60% of our turnover is sous-vide -- and this is genuine sous-vide, where the meat or fish is cooked slowly in a vac-pack with its sauce, not meat that has been cooked separately then bunged in a pouch. With our method you get a moist, highly nutritious product with the added benefit that it's pasteurised, which gives a long chilled shelf-life.

I'd studied sous-vide principles at college and felt we could use it to take ready meals to another level. It's a system used by most of the Michelin-starred chefs in France and the UK -- and the US, for that matter. But I decided to invest heavily and buy the most advanced, sophisticated system. It's French, it's computer controlled, and it means that if and when there's a requirement we can produce dishes of Michelin quality.

Pasteurisation is a relationship between time and temperature. You can pasteurise very quickly at high temperature but that changes the make-up of the food organoleptically. The system we've bought looks at the temperature and time and computes the PV -- the pasteurisation value -- that you'll achieve with that relationship. It means we can choose to cook slower, at lower temperatures, and still achieve a chilled shelf-life of up to 28 days.

That's the essence of sous vide. The lower temperatures mean the meat doesn't throw out its juices and you don't destroy the flavours. And a major benefit, which is very topical, is that you don't need as much salt to bring out flavours that would be lost at higher temperatures. We haven't done any calculations yet but it certainly means we can work within government guidelines on salt without adversely affecting the flavour.

Some manufacturers just use sous-vide to cook diced meat, then open the pouch and shove the meat into a crystalline polyethylene terephthalate (CPET) tray. The two things about our system are the superior equipment we use and the fact we're run by a chef and staffed by chefs. Even our business development director is a chef. So you've got the most technical equipment, tagged on to the most creative environment, meaning we can produce anything that we're asked to produce.

Sous-vide hasn't been developed in retail yet, but in my view the potential is astronomical. It's got extended life, which is what retailers want, and a very high quality product. Most of the chilled products in French supermarkets are sous-vide.

So what's holding it back? It's purely a packaging issue. The problem used to be the image of 'boil in the bag' but nowadays there are ways you can package sous-vide that is more in line with CPET-type tray packaging.

If we had a factory the same size again, I am sure I would be talking to Waitrose and others about sous-vide. It's not going to take us that long to get to £7.5m turnover. Then we'll be looking at moving lock, stock and barrel to a bigger factory.

What will get us to £7.5m is continued growth from the existing customer base and working with other big players in foodservice.

We recently developed a range of conference and banqueting (C&B) dishes that have already had great success. I'm talking mainly about centre-of-plate items: stuffed chicken breasts, stuffed pieces of fish, daubes of beef and so on. Those are generally cooked without sauces, and they're ready for the C&B chefs to reheat, add sauces and maybe brown the meat too. They end up with a product that looks 'just cooked' but which was prepared by us here in Stockport.

As a chef I am dead against that idea in principle -- if the result is a compromise. But the way we are doing it, the aroma is amazing, it's nutritionally good, and the succulence is better than they could produce in-house. So we're setting ourselves up on a bit of a pedestal and saying we can produce something that's better than can be achieved in the C&B environment.

I've had a love of cooking from the age of 10. In my early teens someone introduced me to Elizabeth David's cookbooks. Reading those and doing the recipes was my real inspiration. I got some 'O' and 'A' levels, then, rather than take a craft course, I did an HND in hotel and catering management. It was a business course but we were also sent out on two stages of industrial experience, and I worked in kitchens in Switzerland and in the Park Lane Hilton. So I experienced the front-of-house and the kitchen environments. And from that I became a chef.

My first job was with a restaurant called Fouquet's on the Champs Elysées, Paris. As a commis chef I was very much a trainee, but in those days there was still an ethos of people working their way up from the bottom. Besides, I'd been cooking since the age of 10. So I learned it because I loved it.

Interview by Mick Whitworth

PERSONAL

Name: Paul Durbin

Age: 47

Career highlights: HND in hotel and catering management at Bournemouth University. Spent 10 years as a chef in Michelin-starred hotels and restaurants across Europe. In 1985, helped set up a restaurant in Cheshire, then formed Loxton Foods in 1986

Domestics: Lives in Alderley Edge, Cheshire, with wife Janet. They have two children: James (19) and Claire (16)

Outside work: "I play a lot of competitive squash and sail racing dinghies -- badly. My other love is gardening. I find it therapeutic"