North Wales producer Smashed Cow Sauces made their market debut in October 2024 and produce a range of barbecue and chilli sauces.
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.
With funding from Project HELIX, John was assigned a food technologist from Food Technology Centre 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.
To ensure safety and consistency of the products, the Food Technology Centre also undertook a pilot scale production trial to emulate a typical production batch, utilising the pasteurisation and bottling equipment available within the Food Technology Centre’s prepared foods hall.
Benefits of support
As a result of the work funded by Project HELIX, John was able to take his product from concept to market within a year.
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 Food Technology Centre, 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 Food Technology Centre in the future by redeveloping the processes to be better able to supply larger distributors in the local food chain.”