View from HQ

support innovative, tasty, wellmade products from the smallest makers. They are rejected because they are not ‘local’ and the irony comes when that same producer is listed in a major wholesaler’s catalogue two years later, they are given some shelf space. I guess he’s asking if we have lost the art of sourcing using our palates, because it is easier to sign o fewer invoices each month or because we see local as more important than good (or great).

It’s a conundrum. The debate is a complex one and I’m certainly not going to fully explore or solve it in my 400-ish words here. But Marcus’s sentiment has resonated with me twice in the last week.

The rst was while attending the excellent Bread & Jam Festival. I listened to an absorbing talk by Pam and James, the husband-andwife team behind the Sauce Shop, usefully explaining their journey from kitchen table to supplying Waitrose via the independents.

Apart from a short, ill-fated irt with a contract maker, they have always made their own sauces, replicating in everincreasing scale the same recipes and cooking methods.

Good on them. A great tasting product, that they make and understand, and can therefore sell and justify to any retail buyer. They maintain that through doing the ‘hard yards’ in the independents (with the help of Marcus) they got listings when they could have been ignored for being esoteric, niche or just another sauce company.

Marcus popped into my head again in while I was in Asturias, northern Spain. On a visit to Anchoas Hazas, we were shown how to clean, de-bone and prepare some divine salt-aged anchovy llets. It’s a time-consuming process, so much so that they produce just 80 tins of these wonderful things a day. The factory only a few miles up the coast churns out 800 per day.

Our Spanish compadres are making a truly excellent thing. They’re not local but you should stock them because they are the best – and I want to buy more.

I enquired about stockists in my best Spanglish. “No in UK. The Brexit” was the response. I think the owner understood my potty-mouthed response and I moaned again, unlike Marcus.