5 minute read
Taste and quality Freshway Connect’s Edward Gibson.
Taste and quality
Edward Gibson (pictured) is commercial director at Freshway Connect, having started out in the food business in the late seventies, working alongside his brother in helping grow a successful bakery business. This year, having been a judge for the Food Quality Awards and the Pizza Pasta & Italian Food Awards, he was invited to judge some of the Sammies too, and where he says he was on look-out for products that deliver in terms of taste and quality.
How did you start out in the food business, and was it what you wanted to do originally?
I did a law degree, and it was shortly after finishing this, in the late seventies, that my brother started a bakery business – Hot Bread Kitchens Ltd - by opening a shop. I went along while waiting for my exam results and by the time my exam results came back, I’d decided that I’d stick with the bakery business. I think it’s fair to say that I never had a great passion for the law, and I was wondering what I should do, but it was clear that our business was going to grow quite quickly - it was more exciting.
My father had been in the bakery trade, and it was the last thing I thought I’d go into, but we opened one shop in August and by Christmas we had another two shops and then we grew the shop business, eventually building it up to 28 through the eighties.
We started selling sandwiches in our shops, and which we made in our shops. Then, in the early nineties, we created a unit to make the sandwiches for our shops initially, before starting to sell them to third parties, to forecourts, and then we went into foodservice – contract catering and hospitals, and then eventually into retail (ASDA, Morrisons mainly, and we also manufactured and developed the WeightWatchers sandwiches).
From the early nineties to the mid-noughties, we built a £20 million manufacturing business and during the nineties, I was chairman of the BSA for six years.
I think our business was probably unique in that coming from a bakery background, we baked a lot of our own bakery products – not sliced bread, but rolls – and which gave us quite a distinct offering.
How did you get involved in the Sammies Awards judging?
I was asked! This is the first year I’ve been involved in the judging, although I’ve done judging for the Food Quality Awards and also the Pizza Pasta & Italian Food Awards (PAPAs).
What’s required of a judge, and what have you learnt?
You need to be objective. And you need to be aware that while a product might not be to your particular liking, you shouldn’t judge it on personal taste. It should be judged overall.
You have to be very keenly aware of what you are judging. If you’re judging a healthy food product, you have to judge it in that manner. You can’t necessarily be looking for qualities that you might expect in other products, but you’ve got to be aware that it’s geared towards a particular demographic. But number one for me is that you are looking for food quality.
For example, in a vegan product, say, I’m not looking for a lack of taste only to then say “well, it’s a vegan product, so we shouldn’t expect too much of it”. It’s got to deliver.
You have to put personal preference to one side and try and be as objective as possible.
Any advice for entering the awards?
It sounds obvious, but choose the right category. Be very clear in your description as to what you’re being judged against and what you’re actually proposing to deliver. I find that you are not swayed so much by the background literature that’s provided with the samples, but if someone’s entering a full-flavoured such and such-type of sandwich, you will be judged against how full flavoured it is. So be very clear that what you’re proposing is what you’re delivering, with the quality and the taste being the two over-riding features that you need to be mindful of.
If it’s a new food product of the year, for instance, people get carried away
with the fact that it is new and there’s nothing quite like it, but it’s no good if it doesn’t deliver in terms of the quality and taste.
What’s your current favourite sandwich or ‘go to’ food to go item, and why?
I still like a freshly-made chicken and bacon baguette – a good quality baguette, good quality chicken and a good quality Maple-cured bacon. I do think that’s hard to beat. Of the products I ate this year, though, there was a very innovative sushi that I really liked. I like sushi anyway, but the fl avours were good and they took sushi to a diff erent level in terms of taste.
Looking ahead to the future, what trends do you see?
Oriental tastes - the bao buns that I think itsu were doing, for example. I think generally the new products are going to come from world cuisine. We’ve had all sorts of introductions into this country. We’re sort of like a sponge, really, for cuisines from across the world - possibly, people would argue, because we haven’t really had one of our own.
I visited a Georgian restaurant recently, in Greenwich, London, and even the wines were Georgian. London is a world city, and why, I think, we’re getting so much creativity, because somebody will go along and eat something, and because they work for a sandwich company, they’ll say “that’s a fabulous fl avour, how can we do that in a sandwich?”
I think the industry is in good health. It’s obviously had a very diffi cult time, but I’m pleased to see that when I talk to some of the smaller companies, they seem to have weathered the storm and are coming through, fi ring on all cylinders.
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