Marking 35 years of success, Stroud-based Kitchen Garden is celebrating another year of exemplary food safety standards.
Kitchen Garden Foods – who are producers of artisan jams, sauces, pickles & condiments – along with their brand of on-the-go food, Wolfys – have received confirmation from food safety auditors that their certification has been awarded for another year.
James Moinet, co-owner, said: “The last 12 months have been really, really busy for audits and we’re delighted to be able to continue to show that what we do at Kitchen Garden is safe and to high standards. Over the last year we’ve seen Trading Standards, EHO, HSE, Customer Auditors, Soil Association Organic & SALSA come to visit us. Even the United States FDA flew over to audit us!”
James added: “The SALSA certification (which stands for Safe and Local Supplier Approval) is really important to us as a small business – it means we’re able to supply our larger customers such as Waitrose, Ocado, British Airways, GWR Trains & easyJet as well as manufacturer for many other well-known brands. SALSA look at how we’re making our products along with the processes we have in place to make sure we’re doing it safely. They also look at how we manage our allergens and ingredients as well as our documentation and files – that can be anything from staff training documents, to our recipe sheets. It’s a process of continuous improvement and every year we always learn something new – it’s a really valuable and worthwhile certification and it’s great to get it again, and on our 35th birthday!”
Kitchen Garden also received their Soil Association Organic Certification in recent months – demonstrating their ability to ensure their Organic products are safe, and use only 100% Organic Ingredients.
James Horwood, co-owner, said: “We started to produce Organic products back in the late 1990s and have continued to do so ever since. It’s really important to us that we can maintain our Organic Certification – it’s reassuring to customers & consumers that they know what they’re eating is genuinely Organic.”
Asked if organic produce is still enjoying good sales, James added: “Yes, I think it is. Certainly for us our Organic sales have grown year-on-year, every year, and is now a large part of our turnover. There may be some anecdotal decline during high-inflation and when things got really expensive – but you’d expect that. However, now with the emergence of regenerative farming, I think producers will see good organic growth in the coming years.”
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