Video sings praises of North trio

Aug 12 2008 by Jane Hall, The Journal

IS the North East home to some of the UK’s finest cuisine? Tesco thinks so and has produced a video featuring three of the region’s best known and successful artisan producers to prove it.

Wylam Brewery, the Northumberland Cheese Company and rapeseed oil producer Borderfields are the stars of the three-and-a-half-minute film, which highlights how all three businesses have risen from small beginnings to supply the major supermarkets such as Tesco.

The film, which can be seen at www.journallive.co.uk/taste, also focuses on The Journal’s Taste North East England Campaign launched at the end of last January to encourage consumers, retailers, hoteliers and restaurateurs to buy, use and eat local.

The most visible sign of The Journal’s support for local producers will be our Taste 2 food and drink festival in association with Tesco on August 30 at Macdonald Linden Hall Hotel, Golf and Country Cub at Longhorsley, near Morpeth, Northumberland.

It is set to be the biggest event of its kind ever held in the North East, with about 100 artisan food and drink producers from across the region gathered for the one-day event alongside star guests Hairy Bikers Simon King and Dave Myers, as well as local celebrity chefs giving cookery demonstrations.

Taste 2 follows a hugely successful joint Journal-National Trust food and drink festival last April which saw 62 producers and more than 10,000 members of the public descend on picturesque Gibside estate, near Rowlands Gill, Gateshead.

In the Tesco film Mark Robertson of the Northumberland Cheese Company, John Boyle of Wylam Brewery and Jill McGregor of Borderfields – all of whom will be at Taste 2 – reveal how from unlikely beginnings all their businesses have become prizewinning success stories, helping to put North East food and drink on the national culinary map.

Wylam Brewery was set up in 2000 by John and friend Robin Leighton at Heddon-on-the-Wall, Northumberland, and from an initial six casks a week is now producing about 140 – with little or no marketing. But as John explains in the film, it is the “reputation of the product” that has driven the growth and seen Wylam now available in pubs from the Scottish Borders to Yorkshire and Lancashire.

The business developed out of Robin’s home brewing hobby. John, a retired computer engineer, used to be “paid” in Robin’s home-brew when the former merchant seaman had problems with his PC. The beer was so good, the pair decided to produce it commercially.

Wylam Rocket won last year’s regional Tesco Drinks Award and now goes to 90 of the chain’s stores. And at any one time seven beers are now being brewed from a range of 20 recipes, many with names celebrating local icons, such as Northern Kite, a ruby ale produced to mark the re-introduction of red kites into the area.

The Northumberland Cheese Company, at Blagdon, owes its beginnings to the “can do” attitude of the early 1980s.

“Following the victory in the Falklands War, everything seemed possible,“ Mark recalls. “Everyone could have a go and do something.”

The head of the Northumberland Cheese Company has clearly made this his motto. “That’s the kind of man I am. I have a go.” Cheese-making is clearly a passion for Mark, but it wasn’t his first. In 1974 he was a hill farmer near Otterburn, Northumberland, with 700 sheep. But incensed, among other things, by “the French cheese invasion”, he was spurred on to try making his own.

Offerings have grown from one cheese to 16, all of which champion the region with names such as Coquetdale, Cheviot, Kielder and Hadrian.

Now Mark’s cheeses can be found not only in Tesco shops but specialist stores across the country.

Border Fields, at Coldstream Mains in Berwickshire, is a farmers’ collective set up three years ago. But already its Oleifera Rapeseed Oil has won a coveted gold star at this year’s Great Taste Awards organised by the Guild of Fine Foods, while its Borderfields Cold Pressed Rapeseed Oil has recently gone on the shelves of 130 Tesco stores in the North and Scotland.

What comes across in the video is how passionate Mark, John and Jill are about their own products. As Jill McGregor says: “It is great that we actually all grow it ourselves and that we are involved in the whole process, which is very exciting.”

Tesco’s senior buying manager for the North, Alistair Robinson, is in no doubt of the importance of local food.

Interviewed at Wylam Brewery, he says: “Customers want to be able to buy more local product; now that fits in with what we are trying to do anyway because you are only successful in this game if you do what your customers want you to do.”