An exciting day at the Love Food Spring Festival today! I was honoured to be on the judging panel for the Local Producers section of the Bristol Good Food Awards, organised by Guide2Bristol.
The panel of judges consisted of me, Barbora Stiess from The Devilled Egg Kitchen Academy, wine and food expert Angela Mount, Daily Telegraph food editor Xanthe Clay, Good Food channel presenter Thane Prince, and Richard Truscott of Almondsbury Garden Centre.
Public voting led to the three highest scoring producers being shortlisted in each of 11 categories. We sampled produce from each of these three in each category before deciding on our winners. The winner in each category will be presented with their award at a black tie dinner on July 3rd.
Congratulations to all of those who were shortlisted – the winners are as follows:
Best Local Cheese: Homewood Cheeses
Best Local Preserve: Rose Farm
Best Local Condiment: Forage Fine Foods
Best Local Charcuterie: (we split this into three categories as it was too hard to judge as one!
- Best Chorizo: The Bath Pig
- Best Ham: Trealy Farm
- Best Salami: Castellano’s
Best Local Oils or Sauces: Fussels Fine Foods
Best Local Bakery: Joe’s Bakery
Best Local Cakes: The Little Cake Stand
Best Local Confectionery: Upton Cheyney Chilli Company
Best Local Cider: Dick Willows
Best Beer: Wickwar Brewing Co.
Best Local Wine: Wraxhall Vineyard
Very disappointing that out of 13 winners only 2 of them are actually Bristol based producers or within 5 miles of Bristol!
The competition criteria is clearly too wide and really should be limited to products that are actually made or available in Bristol! It is supposed to be the BRISTOL Good Food LOCAL PRODUCER Awards after all!
But all of those companies supply into Bristol from the local area, which is why people in Bristol nominated them. If it was restricted purely to companies with a Bristol postcode, the awards would effectively go to the local producers for having a Bristol postcode…there simply wouldn't be enough to make full categories.
I think most categories would have been fine with JUST Bristol-based producers! The wine one is the only one I can think of that we might have struggled with.
The fact that there were so many non-Bristol-based producers included suggests that maybe awareness of local brands isn't that high…
Yes, that's true…producers need to get their message out more, and hopefully BGFA will help with that.
Rudy, aren't the awards supposed to go to LOCAL producers?? I can't see the issue!
At least one of the winners doesn't supply in to Bristol and charges ridiculous amounts to even consider delivering to Bristol!
If this is a BRISTOL based award and designed to champion all of the fabulous producers we have in Bristol, surely it's not only up to Bristol-based producers to get their message out there but also up to the award organisers to advertise the awards a bit more?
Personally I think awareness of local brands is fairly high all round, I think awareness of the awards was fairly low. I only knew about it because of a tweet by Bristol Bites! I know tweets are pretty wide spread these days but can I ask were the awards promoted on local radio or Points West for example?
More awareness needed all round I think and also a firm criteria for the businesses to be LOCAL not in Monmouthshire/Herefordshire/Gloucestershire etc!