Enthusiastic Ambassadors

It’s great to share our passion for the English Bramley apple.

We have just attended an event, for one of our customers, that we always look forward to. The event is called the ‘Farmer’s Market’.

Our customer provides exceptional meals to organisations catering to the young and the elderly, in hospitals, care homes, nurseries, schools and at home. It is well-known for the quality of its food and the passion with which it is developed and made.

Our customer works with a wide range of intermediaries between production and the end consumer, so it is vital that these intermediaries are fully and passionately engaged with the sources of the raw materials.

That’s where Farmer’s Market comes in.

Approximately six ingredient and raw materials food suppliers are invited to take a stand where they showcase, not their latest plant and machinery, but the way in which their products are grown or made, their support for the environment and the unique and memorable values that their products have.

Whilst it is a simple matter to talk about the features of an end product it is far more motivating to be able to extol the benefits of its ingredients and the reasons it tastes so fantastic – taking in all of the areas mentioned above: the environment where an ingredient is grown (in our case the English Bramley apple orchards), the environmental benefits (we have ‘bug hotels’ in our orchards and use close-planting techniques to optimise land-use for example), the care and attention that goes into every aspect of the food chain and the passion of the people involved.

Farmer’s Market seeks to equip intermediaries with the information that isn’t contained in the ingredients list, to enable them to be able to engage with schools, care homes, hospitals and more, with passion and conviction.

This year our ‘market stall’ was located close to an artisan cheese maker and an ice cream company. Delicious!

Because nothing compares with the English Bramley apple for cooking, and our customer is passionate about its use in their products, we chose to showcase the Bramley and the 100 acres of orchards that surround our food factory in Kent, the ‘garden of England’. We supply other fruit products of course, but it is the English Bramley that took centre stage.

During the course of two days, we get to meet many of the people who will be talking to care homes, hospitals, nurseries and schools; to share our passion for the products we make and to talk about the things that people don’t always consider.

Then there are the ‘fun facts’: what grows if you plant a Bramley apple pip? Where does the very first Bramley apple tree still survive today – more than 200 years after it first appeared? Why is the Bramley called the Bramley? Why is every Bramley apple tree directly related to the very first tree? And much, much more.

We talk about how we interact with our environment including the many footpaths that cross Fourayes land, the bug hotels in the orchards that encourage natural insect habitation, the way in which we optimise the land we have, our orchard and hedge row management, our state-of-the-art environmental water treatment plant and so much more.

Farmer’s Market is a unique and fantastic opportunity to engage not only with a customer, but also to meet the people at the front line who are the ambassadors for the products that contain the ingredients we supply.

Best of all is the look on the faces of these people when we talk about the amazing English Bramley apple. It really is a remarkable fruit, and we can never have enough opportunities to tell its incredible story to as many people as possible.

Phil Acock

MD of Fourayes, Vice Chairman of?British Apples & Pears?and Fruitician