Smokin' hot

I started this business in my back garden. My first ambition was to have my own restaurant, but I started smoking garlic bulbs in a small home made smoker made out of an old tin ballot box.

I moved into a shed on a farm six years ago and started attending farmers' markets and food fairs. At the same time, I sent a sample of smoked salt to a firm called Maldon. They sent me a tonne. I very quickly built another smoker to handle that, then they sent me six tonnes, so I built another smoker. Since then we've been non-stop smoking salt for Maldon.

Soon afterwards, I sent some smoked pepper to Carl Olson, head of innovation, Europe for [herbs and spices firm] McCormick. He said it was fantastic and we have worked closely with McCormick on and off for four years. Off the back of that experience I started approaching everybody in the area.

We source our garlic from Fraser Key's farm of Lincolnshire, which grows garlic only for us. We are looking to further develop the marketing behind English garlic in 2012 and beyond and potentially build the brand and range.

From 20062007 I got used to working with large-scale firms. At the time EU directives on flavourings and labelling, EC 1334/2008 and EC 2065/2003, was coming in, the first of which only came into force this year.

This means that if manufacturers don't use naturally smoked ingredients, if they use smoked condensate flavourings, they can't call their products 'smoked'. They have to be called 'smoke flavoured'. To maintain the clean declaration, they can't use any additives or preservatives.

Processors knew they only had two to three years to come up with a supplier manufacturing large quantities of smoked ingredients for the food industry to be clean-label compliant. This has worked to our advantage. The only way to maintain the clean-label declaration is to use us, as we are, to our knowledge, the only firm supplying clean-label smoked ingredients.

From 2008 we started a huge process of new product development (NPD) experimentation. We developed a smoking process that's unique to us. We finalised the theory two years ago and tested it on a small scale.

We began innovating with new products, such as salts; spices; pastes; sugars; oils, starches and herbs and we'd send them out to people all round the country developing ready meals; blends; seasonings and snack flavourings. Now manufacturers have the opportunity to move into natural smoked flavours. Almost every day it seems Tesco or Asda is asking us about natural smoking.

In 2010 we networked and went to meetings with companies such as Kerry Foods. We do NPD work with organisations such as Griffith Laboratories, although we are also building new in-house laboratories for further NPD. I came up with ideas for ingredients that could be smoked. We are also recruiting Hayley Breden, an NPD manager, who joins us from Ginger's Kitchen. She has previously worked for Kate's Cakes.

The period 20112012 is when full-scale commercialisation will come to realisation for us, just in time for supplying the demand. If we had been where we are now 12 months ago we would have been twiddling our thumbs. One of the biggest recent developments is a range of barbecue sauces we developed for Bennet Opie based on natural smoked ingredients. They liked the product so much they decided to approach us with a view to licensing the product to them. The range will be ready for launch next spring.

In future, we're going to work under the 'Intel Pentium' approach to marketing. Any product containing a naturally smoked ingredient from us will be able to carry an endorsement logo.

We currently have batch smoking capacity of 2t, which is set to increase to 5t in the first quarter of 2012. We estimate our turnover will quadruple in the next 12 months and increase by two to five times the year after that. We have a very aggressive growth plan. We are really targeting the natural, industrial sector at the moment and innovation will continue at pace.

We are building a clean room, a walk in refrigerator, a food preparation area and a wash- down area. Apart from the existing five smoking chambers, administration and laboratory areas the rest about 279m2 over two storeys will all be storage. We want to build a factory with scalability in mind and we have already identified premises we could move into and be up and running within eight weeks [if we expand more].

We have been supported in our growth by Sussex Business Partnership and, in particular, by Tim Breden, who performs an advisory role and is a contact for generating funding. Tim achieved rapid growth as Kate's Cakes' operations director.

We have an eye on environmental issues and aim to to send zero waste to landfill by 2013. We also use the by-product of wood from the timber to run our smokers.

Factory facts​

Location: Besmoke, B1 Ford Airfield, Arundel, West Sussex, BN18 0HY

Staff: 10, including three part time

Size: 604m2

Operating hours: 7am5pm, five days a week

Products: The Besmoke brand for retailers and farmers' markets includes smoked and unsmoked garlic and a range of seasoning blends and spices. The company is about to launch smoked oils and is going to launch a range of barbecue sauces. For other manufacturers, which represent 65% of business, Besmoke smokes salt, spices, sugars, pastes, oils and herbs. The firm aims to grow this to 85% of the business within three years.

Turnover: £140,000 currently and set to increase by five times in the next year

Personal​

Name: Huw Griffiths

Age: 36

Career highlights: "It had been a huge ambition of mine to set up a food business by the time I was 30, which I achieved. The first time I set smoke in the smokers and realised that all of the investment and development had actually paid off was also a huge moment for me."

Domestics: "I have a partner and three children: a girl and two boys."

Outside work: "We're a big sailing family. I also love travelling, particularly to northern Spain, and the rural lifestyle at our home in West Wittering."