00:00Behind me is Martin Thomas Butchers here in Passingham. They are very well known
00:04for their pork pies, their bacon, their black pudding and frankly for giving
00:08great service and great food to everyone in this area and further beyond. The
00:12reason we're here today is because they've just won multiple national
00:16awards for their pork pies, for their bacon and of course for their black
00:21pudding. Let's go and have a chat to Craig, the owner of the place and the
00:24sixth generation of the Thomas family to run this place and see what he has to
00:27say. So, follow me.
00:35We've obviously been here before, we've spoken to Craig before and they have been
00:39very successful over the years. So tell us about the most recent awards that you've won.
00:43The most recent ones that we've just had in the National Craft Butchers. We put our
00:49normal multi-award winning black pudding in. This time we decided to put alongside it
00:55a regular dry cured bacon both rind on and rind off and our rind on bacon took a gold medal
01:02as you can see. But this time we decided to put our newest products in which was our normal
01:07dry cured bacon but we had them smoked and we sent that in so the new products was our
01:13tree cut dry cured and our regular back bacon smoked. And both of those, to say they've only been
01:18launched a month, picked up gold medals with one of them picking up 100% including the judges extra
01:24two marks for quality, consistency and looks. And now that is the only smoke that we're putting in
01:30in two types. It will be what every customer who comes in can actually buy here at Martin Thomas
01:35Butchers going forward. We're not going to buy in Danish or Dutch bacon. It will all be our own dry cured bacon
01:41done specially here to our own cure, our own aging and then it will be smoked specially for us in
01:47Worcestershire. And let's just talk about the winning of these awards because I can tell you
01:51you're a competitive person otherwise you wouldn't enter these awards every year. What does it mean for
01:55you to keep getting this mark of achievement, this endorsement from the judges? On some of the awards
02:01like the Butchers we're going up against Butchers of our size and not much bigger. But on some of the
02:07products we're actually up against supermarket suppliers and those who believe they've got chefs
02:13who are doing their creative side, they've got multiple tasters. Yet us we're in a small business
02:18who put the same products that we enter and sell in our normal shop up against these big boys and we
02:24are actually taking the same level of awards and sometimes higher than what the supermarket suppliers
02:29are actually producing in just a small little village rural shop using all the products that we get
02:36available to us is an absolute massive fantastic achievement because you would normally expect
02:42that to be done in large areas where they've got multi-million pound backup and everything and we're
02:48actually doing it in just a small little retail shop. And it's keeping that legacy going of
02:54Martin Thomas, you being the sixth generation and already achieving that. What else is there left to do?
03:00Is it just to do the same thing again or are you already looking at other things you can do?
03:04Well, if and going forward we would obviously try and bring different flavours in, different ways of doing it,
03:12similar to how you can buy products and then you would have like an Italian ham, we're looking to see if
03:18there's any ways we can do better than our normal ham that we do as a cooked ham. But going forward it's only just improving every bit better to either the type of meat available and then bring that as a better meat or a different breed into the actual competition.
03:36Of course, the awards is one thing but it's also the acknowledgement from the customer because I can tell you're always quite busy and you always seem to sell these quite well so the customers must love these products.
03:46Well that's right and the thing is we wouldn't be doing them if the customers didn't come to buy them. So for us it's yes we do it right, we enter it but the customers have got to come back and keep buying it for us to keep making it so it's a double-edged sword but once we get it we've then got to keep making so much because everybody wants
04:04their favourite one of the products and it might be a case of now we do five bacon but we're doing five bacon and somebody might like three so we need to do those three for one person and some for somebody else.
04:17Sounds like a nice problem to have.
04:18Yes, which is only good going forward because we know everything same as the supply is we're controlling the manufacturer and we're controlling the supply which means we're not reliant on somebody else saying we can't get that product anymore, what are you going to sell?
04:33Because we're making it all here, we know what the product is and we can keep the quality of us high for the customers.
04:39Right, brilliant. Well get down here, buy a pork pie, buy the black pudding, buy the bacon and just help businesses like this keep going.
Be the first to comment