12 minute read
SHELF TALK
Whitebox Cocktails adds Margaritas to range of pre-mixed premiums
By Tanwen Dawn-Hiscox
As Britain’s affinity for tequila continues its upward trend, Whitebox Cocktails has introduced a margarita to its premixed premium drinks range.
The 19% ABV cocktail, branded as Squeezy’s Margarita, is made the classic way – combining tequila with triple sec, lime juice and a touch of salt, and comes in a trendy looking 10cl can.
Since they took on the challenge of creating bar quality cocktails for retail, the seasoned drinks industry professionals behind Whitebox have developed a negroni, a martini, an old fashioned, a boulevardier, a limited edition mezcal margarita and two longer drinks: Disco Baby, made with vodka and watermelon & thyme soda, and Hippy Fizz, which features gin, patchouli and tropical shrub soda.
Co-founder Alex Lawrence said that while perfecting the latest recipe had been “quite the journey”, it was worth the wait.
“If we are going to put our name to a Margarita, we wanted to make sure it actually tasted like a proper one we would be happy to serve to our pals.”
Fellow co-founder Ben Iravani added: “Tequila is one of the fastest growing spirits categories in the UK right now and the Margarita is well on its way to becoming one of the nation’s favourite cocktails too. With Squeezy’s Margarita, as with all of our drinks, we wanted to replicate the quality and taste of a bar quality cocktail in a ready-to-pour format that cocktail aficionados will love”.
RRP £30 per six cans. Current stockists include Hackney Essentials in London, Alpha Bottle Shop in Bristol, Cork & Cask in Edinburgh and Wee Beer Shop, Glasgow.
whiteboxcocktails.com
WHAT’S NEW
Branching out from its usual base of chefs and bakers, Yorkshire brand Bonilla Vanilla is seeking distributors for a new consumer range of vanilla products. Its Pure extract is made with 50g of beans a litre and priced at £3.50 a bottle. The stronger, Intense extract contains 100g of beans per litre and has an RRP of £4.50, as does the 50g jar of Vanilla Bean Paste.
bonilla-vanilla.com
Italian food brand Crosta & Mollica is stepping into the ready meal game with the introduction of four pasta dishes. The Al Forno range includes two types of lasagne (one with meat and the other vegetarian), an aubergine parmigiana and a seafood linguine. RRP £5 per 400g.
crostamollica.com
Drawing on Kentish traditions past, the recently restored Maidstone Distillery has developed a barrel-aged fruit spirit. Kipsi Rosé Gin is matured in oak-casks then blended with local Morello and dark cherries, strawberries and raspberries, resulting in a drink the distillers hope will show the Garden of England’s soft fruits in their best light. RRP £42 for a 70cl bottle.
themaidstonedistillery.com
Single estate Wild Roiboos is the latest addition to Nazani Tea’s range of ethically sourced, handpicked infusions. Grown on Bloemfontein Farm and Nature Reserve in South Africa, which is owned by the Heiveld cooperative of indigenous farmers, the Roiboos plant was selected for being a perennial. This ensures that it grows back year after year and that it is resistant to droughts and wildfires, promising sustainable income for the growers. It is hand cut, fermented and sterilised according to local regulations, giving it its distinctive colour and taste. Available in 100g bags, caddies and 250g catering pouches. POA for trade prices. nazanitea.co
Paley Photography
Counter points Caviar
Food writer and former deli owner Glynn Christian offers up some category-specific conversation starters to sharpen your sales technique.
• Caviar is a broad term for the salted, fresh eggs of large fish. • The best caviar is from sturgeons, found in every ocean and such fresh water as the Gironde, the Great Lakes, the Mississippi and China’s
Amur River. • Caviar from fish other than sturgeon must be prefixed with the fish’s name. • All wild sturgeons are endangered and protected – there are strict limits on export of ‘wild’ caviar. • Caviar is now farmed worldwide, from Exmoor in the UK’s West Country to Germany, France, USA,
Uruguay, Russia and China. • Caviar was best known from the Russian and Iranian shores of the Caspian Sea;
Caviar is now farmed worldwide
the traditional species were the beluga, oscietra and sevruga. • China now produces more than half of the world’s sturgeon caviar. • Caviar should not be touched with any metal other than gold; use bone, shell, semi-precious stone, wood or plastic. • Air and heat diminish caviar quickly.
WHAT’S NEW
What happens when a Baltimorean moves to the UK with a hankering for pretzels? An elevated take on the classic American snack, Britzels sourdough pretzel pieces come in a Cinnamon Kick kind, finished with brown sugar, butter and a touch of cayenne pepper, or Simply Salted. RRP £4.25/100g.
britzels.com
Just in time for winter, Devon’s Salcombe Brewery Co. has introduced a chocolate stout to its small batch range: Maya, a 4.5% ABV brewed with cacao nibs to complement the caramel and coffee notes in the malt blend. RRP £25 per 6 x cans.
salcombebrewery.com
Trésor Gourmands is targeting the UK market with its waffle-shaped butter crackers made with 30-40% PDO French cheese - including Comté, Roquefort, Mimolette and Maroilles – no preservatives, palm oil, artificial colours or flavours. RRP £2.60 per 60g, or 50 waffles.
lagaufre.fr/English
My magic ingredient
Delizia Estense Agrodolce di Montegibbio bianco
JASON HINDS Co-owner,
Neal’s Yard Dairy
When you’re used to having something that’s of very high quality, and then you can’t get your hands on it, that’s when you notice how good it is.
A salad dressing without it, for me, is not a salad dressing.
The other thing I think it’s brilliant with is just finely chopped shallots for oysters. You don’t really need anything else, because it’s quite concentrated.
We sell very few items other than cheese, but all the things that we do sell have come to us through our travels or relationships. In the case of the Agrodolce, it comes from Zingerman’s, one of the most dynamic specialist food businesses in America, in Ann Arbour, Michigan.
We sell loads of it. Our customers have been buying it for 25 years. It’s not just a magic ingredient for me, it’s a magic ingredient for a hell of a lot of people that come into our shop.
10 Acre relaunches HFSS-compliant crisp range under Fairfields’ wing
By Tanwen Dawn-Hiscox
Snack brand 10 Acre has relaunched its crisp range with new packaging, flavours, and a marketing message highlighting its products’ “healthier” credentials.
The self-styled “Free-From Plus” brand has been working on the new products since being acquired by Colchester-based crisp firm Fairfields Farm in January 2018.
The five new lines all feature messaging promoting their gluten-free, vegan and low-fat credentials, as well as flagging up compliance with HFSS laws.
The new range of potato crisps comes in Cheese & Onion, Cheesy Chilli, Fried Chicken, Sea Salt and BBQ Beef flavours. All of them come in shareable 135g and 35g single serve bags (RRP £2.30 and 90p, respectively).
Though the previous range is still available for sale in retail and on the company’s website, the new branding and flavours are now being phased in and will eventually replace their predecessors entirely.
The crisps’ new look was created by artist Susan Burg to reflect the company’s sustainable credentials: recyclable packaging, produce grown on a farm reliant on renewable energy, fitted with an anaerobic digester, and water storage providing protected habitats for wildlife.
Robert Strathern, co-owner of Fairfields Farm said: “We’re never ones to shy away from a challenge, so when the new HFSS legislation was announced, everyone thought it would be impossible to have a fried crisp that would not compromise on flavour, yet here we are.
“The new 10 Acre branding gives a subtle nod to nature and sustainability, marking our commitment to being carbon neutral and running the farm for the benefit of the future, not just for now.”
tenacresnacks.co.uk Sharpham Dairy has teamed up with The Fresh Flour Co. to create a range of crackers, as well as extending its offering of chutneys. The own-brand sourdough crackers, in Original and Rosemary & Sea Salt flavours have an RRP of £3.50 RRP.
The British Bramley Apple & Hunts Wobbler Cider Chutney is sharp, tangy and lightly spiced, and best paired with soft cheeses like camembert. The Ploughman’s Hunters Elmhirst Ale Chutney – inspired, like the Sharpham cheese of the same name, by entrpreneurs Leonard and Dorothy Elmhirst – is said to go well with cheese, cold meats and pies. Both chutneys cost £4.50 RRP per 220g jar. sharphamcheese.co.uk
MEET THE PRODUCER
Anabelle de Gersigny and Matthew Wade have a unique outlet for their knowledge of contemporary arts and speciality coffee in Hundred House Coffee
[What were you doing before you started Hundred House Coffee, and how did it come about?
Matt and I founded HHC six years ago. We’re both East Londoners. Post-graduation, I set up an art gallery. We went to the Middle East and worked on non-profit studio projects there, Matt propelled a speciality roastery from doing very small volumes to really huge volumes.
We wanted to move back to the UK and we wanted to do a project together - something that we could afford. It was our own investment, we didn’t have any backers, it was our own savings.
We had a connection to this area, so we picked a green patch, found a barn at very good value, and we started the roastery.
What allowed you to prosper as a company?
Getting our first wholesale customer was a game changer. We had a small local to Ludlow, who were taking a few retail bags, then CSONS in Shrewsbury switched from a really big UK roaster to us. Once we had that big first customer, the others started coming in, because we had a point of reference.
Matt is an international roaster, so they were really pleased to support us and really pleased to see someone doing something like that in the area, bringing that contemporary approach to coffee to the region - which hasn’t been that easy.
A lot of our coffees are quite experimental, our farmers use different yeasts and fermentations, or we’ll roast lighter on a lot of the coffees, so we had people trying coffee on markets expecting a really dark roast because that’s what they’re used to - the bitter almost medicinal experience - then they try it and go, ‘ugh, that’s disgusting, it tastes like orange juice.’
But then you’d have the whole other range of people who were like, ‘oh, this is super exciting’.
How did you bring your understanding of art into the mix?
We were a bit worried at first because we needed to make sure the coffee was our main business and the coffee is what funds everything else, so that needs to be spot on, that cannot be questioned. People who look to us know that the quality is there.
Can you talk to us about some of the programmes you set up?
We started with education programmes around food.
Matt is a deeply creative person and he gets a lot of validation from coffee roasting, even though it’s a very repetitive process. I think a lot of people decide that they want to get into coffee roasting and don’t realise, actually it’s an industrial process and it’s very repetitive, and it can be quite boring for a lot of people. Matt knows how to roast completely analog, which a lot of people don’t know how to do anymore, and I feel like our quality is really great for that reason. We wanted to bring that into a classroom. There are a lot of cuts in funding for arts in schools and we felt that this is something really tangible. We also have a belief that businesses should feed into the education system and we had the most incredible response from teachers, just saying they wished more local businesses would do this.
Then there’s our Freak + Unique range. What an incredible time in speciality coffee.
Farmers are diversifying the processes that they’re using with coffees, the yeasts that are being brought in, new infusions of fruits. We were just coming across coffees like beautiful washed Ethiopians and Kenyans and suddenly had these stand-out, strange, extraordinary microlots coming through. They almost do sit separate to the rest of the single origins that we do. So then we were able to showcase what artists that we’ve been working with can do.
We commission an artist for each coffee making it accessible with something really visually fun that stands out, and living up to what the farmer’s been doing with the beans.
Going forward, as we move into a new space with a bit more room, we’re hoping to have a lot more platforms to do more art programming - art, music, more public facing, being able to bring the community in.
hundredhousecoffee.com
WHAT’S NEW
Move over, Manuka: West Australian producer Honey For Life is seeking distribution partners for its premium honeys with antimicrobial properties (known as Total Activity) as high as Manuka honey. Its most popular item is Jarrah, a TA35+ dark amber honey with earthy notes of resin and a caramel finish. RRP £15-25 per 500g jar.
honeyforlife.co.uk
Marine supply store Arthur Beale has created a Seaweed & Samphire gin inspired by the flavours of the sea and the natural affinity between the navy and the spirit. The spirit, the company says, is vivid, complex and smooth on the palate with a long clean finish. The bottle is decorated with a map of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Endurance voyage, magnified through the bottle. RRP £39.95, or £22.95 for trade. With a set of enamel tumblers, RRP £59.95 or £45.95 for trade.
arthurbeale.co.uk
The African Foodie is entering the UK market with a range sauces and relishes inspired by the cuisines of Libya and Tunisia: Berber Harissa, the increasingly popular chilli sauce, as a base for stews and sauces, or simply spread on bread; Shakshuka, the spiced tomato and vegetable sauce, which, cooked with eggs make a complete dish; Omek Houria, a spicy carrot and coriander relish and Mashwiya, the spicy Libyan vegetable mix. RRP £3.50-4.50.
