Swiss firm is run like clockwork

Ruedi Bartholdi, director, Bartholdi

The business began in 1928 as a West End restaurant serving Swiss specialities, becoming the hub of London's Swiss community. We started selling take-home products for customers and by the 1960s the restaurant had become a speciality charcuterie and delicatessen selling food made or prepared on the premises.

We closed the shop on a high in 1990 after winning the Daily Telegraph's London Delicatessen of the Year competition. Our concentration was on wholesale and production and passing trade was drying up. Shutting the shop was emotional. It had been the family business for 60 years and had many loyal customers.

We now make almost every savoury food product, supplying high volume, handmade, high quality food, like a top quality a-la-carte unit.

My brother Tony is md and my brother Hans is a fellow director. We own all the company shares. Tony's wife Kaye is purchasing director and his son Chris, 28, is sales manager and the fourth generation of the family to be involved.

The family moved to the UK from Switzerland in about 1915. When our father Gaston became ill in 1972, my brother Tony took on the business. Hans and I joined five years later. When I joined there were only eight of us, sometimes working from five in the morning to 1am the following morning. We opened our first production unit in Heston in 1985, moving product to London. We were best known for meat products and charcuterie, especially terrines and pâtés. We expanded gradually, mainly supplying the airline catering industry.

We have had some real challenges. In the early 1990s we blew our budget on extending our production unit and in the same week, the first Gulf war started. Civil flights through Kuwait were stopped, our turnover halved and our overheads doubled. We thought we were done for, but we recovered. Then 9/11, changed everything in flight catering. We saw several competitors and suppliers fall, but we survived because we had always reinvested money into the business and never borrowed to expand. We rationalised and immediately pushed harder into other markets, such as hot eat retail snacks.

In November last year an accidental hob fire destroyed our development kitchen, causing at least £40,000 worth of damage. Luckily we were able to upgrade a smaller kitchen, so it didn't stop anything. We're repairing the room.

We have six units for production and two for storage, split between high risk cooking and assembly and low risk areas where raw materials come in. Production staff are cross-trained, so they can move between departments.

In the past eight or nine years, our range has dramatically changed and increased. It has also shifted from mainly bulk product to more portion-controlled and individually packed items. On average daily we make 30-40 different products by hand, using machinery where possible to handle large volumes. Making new products and samples accounts for a huge amount of work, but it's how we get our business. Our cold assembly section can make 180,000 hand held snacks weekly and we make lots of prepared salads. We supply these to the Wimbledon tennis championships, the Six Nations rugby matches and Wembley Stadium.

We made all the savoury products for the prime minister's Millennium Party at the Millennium Dome and provided parts of a meal for the world's largest sit down function involving 12,000 people at Earl's Court. We're also intending to make our presence felt at the 2012 Olympics. We do a lot of catering for large corporate clients, but 50% of our business is still with in-flight catering, either for complimentary service or buy-on-board.

Last year we created a range of artisan pies and quiches which have been listed under brand by three large retail groups. The range now accounts for about 10% of our sales. We're also pushing the Bartholdi brand more, starting with in-flight catering and to a smaller degree farm shops. If a customer-facing packaged product goes out, we try to ensure it bears the Bartholdi name. Feedback has been excellent.

Our five-strong product development team is headed by Tony and includes myself and Hans. Tony, Daryl our production director and I create the recipes. We work closely with our customers' development teams. Either we'll suggest products or they'll come up with ideas and tell us their budget and brief. Often we compete against our own customers, because they either buy in or make products in-house. We can really help meet high volume orders for top quality products.

We often need to create 20 or more recipe variations or completely new ideas weekly. Since we started we have created more than 8,000 recipes. We can make anything between 10 to 20,000 of a product daily. We can even make a few simple desserts. As we get busier, we would like a separate unit to handle these if we continue making them.

We can often make a product from scratch in three hours in an emergency, but normally customers order on day one for delivery on day three or four. Products usually get made within 24 hours. We mix all our seasoning and spice mixes and other ingredients, using very few bought-in pre-mixed items. Products such as pies and quiches are hand-sliced, but we also have a high speed slicing capability. All products are stringently portion controlled, weighed, checked, packed and labelled.

We have a policy of retaining suppliers offering good service. Price is not our major consideration when choosing suppliers. We believe in treating them well. By doing so we find most of them will jump through hoops for us and that's worth a lot.

A computerised product list is circulated to all departments. The system generates recipes and batch sizes for every order. We're also looking at an IT system managing product flow from purchasing to completion.

All raw material is taken to the mixing rooms to prepare the appropriate product mix. It's either mixed by machine or by hand, then made into the format required. Products are then taken to the cooking area or to get flow-wrapped or vacuum packed, possibly having been blast frozen. Apart from the cold assembly plant for sandwiches and suchlike, we have a separate cold kitchen where cold-set items, such as mousses and pestos are made.

In the cooking department we have six double sided cookers: two Fessmann ovens, two Double D baking and roasting ovens and two 2,000l water kettles. We use portable cold storage units to help store finished products. Goods are delivered within the M25 by us or, more often, by third-party distributors to the UK and the rest of Europe.

Interview by Rod Addy

FACTORY FACTS

Location:​ Bartholdi, Unit 10, Air Links Industrial Estate, Spitfire Way, Heston, Middlesex, TW5 9NR

Employees:​ 110 full-time

Turnover:​ £7-8M

Customers:​ Airline, rail and other caterers, hotels, banquet operations, cafés and delis, wholesalers, supermarkets

Products:​ Frozen and chilled cooked and cold-set savoury handmade foods, including pies, pasties, sausage rolls, wraps, pizzas, toasted sandwiches, paninis, quiches, salads, terrines and pâté

PERSONAL

Name:​ Ruedi Bartholdi

Age:​ 50

Domestics:​ Married to wife Barbara with two daughters, Gabrielle, 18, and Francesca, 17

Outside work:​ "My passion is classic American cars, which I build and restore. With Tony and Hans I also race US 'muscle' cars, a 1965 Fastback Mustang and a 1967 Chevrolet Camaro under the company logo in the UK. I'm also into horseriding and skiing and used to be a member of the Swiss Rifle Club of Bisley, of which my grandfather was a founder member."