Sweet idea by charity workers to raise funds
Apr 27 2009 by Richard Fletcher, The Journal
WILLY Wonka has got competition from the North East after enterprising charity workers came up with a delicious idea to raise much-needed funds.
With grants drying up and faced with fewer and fewer ways to get the money they need to keep going, staff at Lynemouth Resource Centre have decided to set up their own chocolate factory to boost their coffers.
It will be a professional operation with specialist machines being imported from America and Europe, a well-designed website, and some interesting and local flavours.
The new company will be called Ken Speckle – a Northumbrian phrase meaning easily recognised, or distinctive.
It will be run by the resource centre’s trust manager, Andrew Gooding, along with Dawn Watts who currently works in the community cafe, and another person yet to be recruited.
Mr Gooding said: “I think it’s going to be fantastic when it all gets going.
“We are a charity but access to charitable funds is diminishing, so we’ve got to find other ways of doing our charitable work. We’ve run the community cafe for a good number of years and at one point we found things were slow at certain times of the week, but we didn’t want to reduce people’s hours. So we thought we should make something.
“We thought about jams and preserves but the world and his wife were doing it, so we asked a firm in Amble what people were after, and they said fudge.”
The resource centre then began producing its own fudge and supplying it to many places along the coast of Northumberland.
They then realised people would pay more for chocolate so changed direction, attending chocolate training courses in Manchester.
