The name Parma is often used as shorthand for air-dried ham. That will take some changing, but as MICK WHITWORTH hears, the team behind Woodall’s Charcuterie hopes to steer consumers in another direction.
Can the Brit unseat Parma as the ‘Hoover’ of ham? WOODALL’S CHARCUTERIE www.woodallscharcuterie.com
ew signage went up this year up on a big industrial unit on Manchester’s Trafford Park estate. It read: “Woodall’s – the home of British charcuterie.” Launched three years ago, with slick branding and product-friendly modified atmosphere packaging, Woodall’s airdried hams and salamis have already found favour with everyone from top
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farm shops like Hollies in Cheshire to chef Mark Hix and Chelsea Flower Show caterer Sodexo. The brand’s Trafford Park production unit takes up just a small space within one of several large sites operated by Continental Fine Foods (CFF), a supplier of deli lines to the supermarkets, which is in turn owned by meat processing giant Cranswick plc. Living under the wing of this huge corporate entity suggests Woodalls has certain advantages over the average small British charcuterie start-up – and let’s face it, it does. But it has taken more than two years since the brand’s launch at the the 2013 Speciality & Fine Food Fair
Guide to British & Continental Charcuterie 2016-17
to get a Woodall’s sign up over the door, which also hints that cash is not being wasted at what remains a niche business even within CFF, let alone within the £1bn Cranswick empire. For CFF managing director Rollo Thompson, who also runs Woodall’s, it’s more like a labour of love. As an air-dried ham and salami operation, it’s a minnow compared with its Italian or Spanish equivalents. And charcuterie-making also brings a whole new set of challenges compared to Cranswick’s mainstream meat operations, like long maturation times (which means tying up capital for many months), unpredictable demand and very different technical specs.
“Woodall’s is less than half of one percent of everything the group does,” Thompson tells FFD. “So it requires the passion of a small group of people to push things along. And that’s not easy to do in an organisation that does things in a very different way.” That small group of people includes both Thompson – who has been with CFF since the 1990s – and Colin Woodall, who broke away from his family’s eighth-generation Cumbrian butchery business at the start of the decade, selling its trade name and its traditional bacon recipes to Cranswick. “When I first met Colin, the focus for Cranswick was still on bacon,” says Thompson, “but once
A supplement to Fine Food Digest