MEAT
Invested in the future
Establishing its own ‘green credentials’, Sam Browne Foods is taking a proactive approach, according to director, William Crowther. You’re moving into your 25th year of business. What are the key principles to your success? Sam Browne Foods strives to always give the customer what they want. Reliability, consistency, great communication, making sure we have the best equipment and technical solutions in place. Flexibility is key in both supply and choice. The factory is set up for product by batch rather than high volume inline production. This allows us to deliver small batch bespoke products. Meat products are under pressure in terms of sustainability and health. How do you approach this? With regards to health, we source raw materials from approved suppliers who we take the time to visit, where possible all the way back to farm. We invested over £500,000 to create a more sustainable production site. All our cardboard is recycled, waste meat products harvested and used to produce methane at an anaerobic digestion plant, and we now harvest all the heat from our fridge and freezing condensing units to preheat water. This reduces both gas and electric use. As a business, we’ve taken a different view on our environmental impact. Rather than using an agency to give us ‘green credentials’, we purchased our own land near York and to date planted 13,000 trees. Yorkshire Wildlife Trust installed four nature ponds on site. To manage the woodland, we allow an agricultural college to train students in woodland management. Cooked meat products will always be energy intensive but we do our best to offset this. Needless to say, vegan/plant-based food has been in the spotlight, but what of meat ingredients? At Sam Browne Foods, part of our main offering is premium product development. We believe that as people are 66 I www.sandwichandfoodtogonews.co.uk
financially squeezed, they are perhaps less willing to dine out – instead treating themselves to a really good quality pizza, ready meal or salad. This category is absolutely in greater demand, especially in the past two years. What can we look forward to in the future? We produce a huge number of new products, recently with a focus on slow cooked. But the old favourites have never fallen out of fashion. For example, marinated chicken, slow-cooked BBQ pulled pork or beef brisket. There is more emphasis on clean label, and our aspiration is to achieve restaurant quality in premium products, while our mainstream ranges are simplified to give the best eating experience at the keenest prices. Tell us more about your key business partnerships. Great supplier relationships have been crucial, especially recently. We see that becoming a way of life in our industry. As a B2B operation, we try hard to give customers solutions and improvements for them to use in their products, so