Ellis McKeown and Liam Stemson
We started trading in April 2021, and then we officially launched our second product in the same year, in November. Our third product has launched this year, May 2023.
We’ve been rolling with the punches since day one to be fair. From cost increases on our glass bottles, to cost increases on our botanicals as well. We face a 10 per cent increase on our duty as well. So we’re having a difficult decision to make on whether to drop the ABB by a few points just to recuperate.
Since day one we haven’t really passed any of our cost increases on to our consumers, whether it be direct or through trade. We’ve just essentially been taking the hit ourselves.
The gin market is extremely competitive so there is a fight involved. We’re frightened we’ll price ourselves out being newcomers to it. So we are trying to be competitive as much as we can, which is our most important thing.
From our point of view we can only get better. We have just opened a bar so from that perspective we already know how hospitality has taken a hit. But bars are still doing well because people still like to go out to drink rather than go out for food.
We’re obviously new to the industry as a whole, so we’re just going along as we learn. Zera Dawson-Gerrard
It’s challenging out there but this is the world that we’re living in. We can’t force it to get better unless we can change some of what we’re doing.
Last year we tried really hard not to pass on price increases and we’ll see that in our figures. We should have passed them on much sooner than we did. We needed to react a bit faster.
Staffing is a huge challenge at all levels. There aren’t enough people willing to put food into pots, there’s no escaping that.
Equally, there are people we pay more to and who have high level jobs. There are sexier jobs out there so they don’t always want to stay with us for all that long. One of our ways of dealing with the labour market is bringing in more automation.
It’s about adapting. It’s about making sure that we are better than the person down the road. It’s about making sure that we offer our customers all the sustainability avenues that they want to go down, that we give them the option of having all the different origins of meat they want and are willing to pay for.
We have to work harder for the same money. But I do have some optimism. We slog on. We have great customers and we’re going to keep working hard at it. I’m really trying to keep smiling.
Debbie Chinn
Whatever the issue is, hopefully we can find some solution within the business support arena but it doesn’t necessarily mean it is always in the public
sector funded area. It is about finding the right people to help the business.
It is about having those in depth conversations and exploring what the core issues really are, so we’re then able to identify the right support, the right people to bring in to have those further conversations. The key is to have the conversation in the first place. If you don’t you could be missing out.
One of the areas food and drink businesses don’t look at is collaboration. Who else could you work with as a ‘win-win’ so you can grow both your businesses?
Collaboration is an opportunity. When we had our biscuit factory business in Blackburn we rented our facility out in the evening when we’d finished production to smaller producers that needed a bigger space.
It gave an additional income to us when our factory wasn’t being productive. There’s the opportunity to share knowledge and also supply chains. A lot more comes off the back of that collaboration where you share resources. I don’t think people look outside the box enough.
Maria Moriarty
The challenges of staffing and cost of living are well documented. Infrastructure is also a massive challenge for rural food and
drink producers. There’s a big conversation to be had about building the right infrastructure for those businesses to thrive.
In terms of hospitality, there’s a big skills conversation to be had. It’s only by developing those skills now that we’re going to have the chefs and new product development.
As a food and drink destination, Lancashire is probably one of the best. It’s a well-kept secret. Our job is to bring that secret out.
It’s about the whole package. It’s about that experience. In Lancashire, we’ve got the natural landscape. The food and drink sector in Lancashire is worth £735m to the county’s economy. So there is an onus on all of us to have conversations with our own MPs.
It’s back to collaboration and that strength of message, and profiling ourselves as the food and drink destination. That’s not just for tourism. I’m talking about skills development, about businesses coming in here to set up.
We have big international brands: PepsiCo, Fisherman’s Friends, Dr Oetker, Farmhouse Biscuits, Budweiser. Let’s harness the strength of all of those voices.
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