Why we chose to be UPF free – it’s all about the Eater…

Once upon a time, every household cooked from scratch – they had to. Convenience food – or, to update the description, ultra-processed-food (UPF) – did not exist. This was just 50 years ago; a time when Wimpy Burger, Vesta packet curries and Spam were breaking onto the scene, but yet to take hold. A time when every community (rich or poor) had a butcher or two and numerous veg shops to purchase fresh ingredients. Now, it’s all different, supermarkets have swept up the local trade, and we’re hooked on and have hooked into UPFs as a way of life.

We’ve been bought off by and we’ve bought into: high salt, high sugar and high oil products, that need other dodgy stuff to bind them all together. It’s a food place created by big business to make their UPF products stay low in cost and return the highest margins. All this is dressed up as if it is a public service and as if some of this food is good for us. The food industry has advertised itself into an overt position of strength, ambitiously loading more and more of these dodgy products into our homes; into our schools and into our hospitals, without a care for our wellbeing or the damage UPF does and is doing to the environment.

But times they are a changing… and we want to make sure every meal we make is UPF free and every meal we sell is focused on the health and wellbeing of the eater – our customers, our colleagues, our friends and of course our families.

Moving from producing meals with ultra-processed products in them, to UPF-free across everything that we cook and sell, took us nine months of R+D and hard work to achieve.

Now, we produce all of our own stocks, sauces and gravies from scratch. Gone are all of the powders and add ins, sold to us to make food production easier, but unhealthy, no matter what. To replace it, in comes a menu of great tasting, healthy meals, ready to feed young, old – and everyone in between. It’s been a steep learning curve, but it has been an important phase of our development.

So, what have we learnt? Three things jump out.

1. If you focus on the health and taste of the eater, much better food arrives as a result.
2. Our meals now taste better, are the same price to produce (or even cheaper in some cases)… And;
3. If we can do it – every food company can do the same… so it begs the question, why not?

In the next few years, the anti-UPF lobby will grow and politicians will change their minds. They will have to, because the damage UPF is doing to everyone’s health is now well documented and irrefutable.

We look forward to the change. In the meantime, we will stay focused on producing the best food possible and our attention will always be on the needs of the eater.