Smashed Cow Sauces
With funding from Project HELIX, John was assigned a food technologist to help with his HACCP development and pre-requisite documentation.
Background
North Wales producer Smashed Cow Sauces made its market debut in October 2024.
The Llanrug-based enterprise began its food-producer journey earlier in the year and is now launching its first products: Alright Treacle BBQ Sauce, Mango & Red Pepper Sweet Chilli Sauce, and Kung Pow! Chilli Garlic Sauce. Dry spice and seasoning mixes are also in the pipeline.
Owner John Ritchie - a chef - has created Smashed Cow Sauces as a family enterprise. He hopes it will become a future employment opportunity for his young daughter, who is autistic. The company’s logo is a highland cow, which is a nod to his Scottish roots and to his daughter’s interest in the cattle.
Support received from Food Technology Centre
With funding from Project HELIX, John was assigned a food technologist to help with his HACCP development and pre-requisite documentation. He also received further help with processing equipment methodology, shelf-life determination, nutritional assessment and final product labelling.
John approached the centre with three different product formulations. In order to develop a suitable working HACCP and to ensure safety and consistency of the products, the Food Technology Centre (FTC) undertook a pilot scale production trial to emulate a typical production batch, utilising the pasteurisation and bottling equipment available within FTC’s Prepared Foods Hall.
After production, nutritional analysis and shelf life testing was carried out. All nutritional information has been calculated using the Food Technology Centre’s nutritional software package, which utilises scientifically-proven nutritional data together with John’s recipe formulations.
As a result of the work funded by Project HELIX, John was able to take his product from concept to market within the year, and he’s now able to begin trading Smashed Cow Sauces.
Benefits of Support
John said: ‘I was first introduced to the Food Technology Centre in November 2023 at the suggestion of my local E.H.O.
My plan was to begin a small homemade sauce company to build a family business for my young autistic daughter. I wanted her to be able to work alongside me in the future to help her hopefully develop some workplace skills to enable her to have the potential to secure a job in the future.
Within a few short weeks I had been introduced to Julia and Steven and quickly began changing my plans to upsize the business when I had been shown the possibilities of what the FTC could offer to a start up.
The Project HELIX funding was fantastic and allowed me to fast forward my business plans. Their help and advice in setting up HACCP, shelf life analysis and training enabled us to skip the homemade processes and move straight to setting up the business to a standard befitting a small scale modern manufacturing process. This help will undoubtedly help me secure a much larger group of future clients.
After 11 months of work with the FTC, I am now confidently able to supply a small range of shelf stable and safe bottled sauces to shops, restaurants and direct customers. I look forward to building on this work again with FTC in the future by redeveloping the processes to be better able to supply larger distributors in the local food chain'.
