Cooking up a storm for fruit and veg cause

How and why did you become involved with Angus Soft Fruits and its AVA strawberry campaign?

I had been chatting to the company for some time and already knew John Gray, having met him at the Highlands Show and complimented him on the great job the company had done with the AVA strawberry.

I didn’t think much of it, until the firm approached me and asked if I wanted to be the face of the product. I was delighted to be asked to front the campaign, and it really is a win-win situation for everyone.

Not only does the campaign benefit, but promoting a Scottish fruit really fits in perfectly with my profile in Scotland as an ambassador for local, regional food and healthy eating.

A month ago I was actually awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Stirling, presented to me by the chancellor, Diana Rigg, for my work for Scottish cuisine and nutritional eating.

What has your work promoting AVA involved to date?

It’s been a fairly wide role so far. I have held two events at the Nick Nairn Cook School here in Port of Monteith, situated halfway between Glasgow and Edinburgh, inviting a mix of consumers, trade journalists and supermarket buyers to watch presentations on the strawberry and then offering them the chance to sample the fruit. It is really heartening to see supermarket buyers put in an appearance at events like these.

Recently, we visited Regent’s Park in London for the Taste of London food festival, where we presented the fruit to journalists and buyers again. The great thing about the work we have done in London, Dundee and at the cookery school is that after each presentation I get the chance to meet the people that have attended, so that my real enthusiasm for AVA can truly come across.

I genuinely think AVA is the best strawberry I have ever tasted. My two kids, my three-year-old boy and five-year-old girl, love it, and they are my test for everything! If they like it, I know it must be good.

We have taken AVA into a lot of schools in Scotland, again running a similar presentation format and encouraging kids to eat berries and teaching them how they can be eaten - at breakfast, as a lunchbox snack and even as a fruit kebab.

Angus Soft Fruits and I liaise closely year round, but our main activities are centred into the April to October period. We have just rounded off a fairly intensive programme and are winding down a little now.

Do you think that the plethora of cookery shows on television today have been instrumental in reawakening consumers to the importance of eating fresh food?

There is absolutely no question that cookery shows have helped the fresh produce cause.

The Great British Menu, in which Britain’s best chefs competed to cook the Queen’s 80th birthday meal, was incredibly successful. Since I appeared on the show it was hard to gauge its impact on the ground, but there is no doubt it generated huge interest in linking fresh food to its point of origin.

Provenance is such a buzzword at the moment, but is true that over the last 12 months, people’s interest in where their food is from has rocketed - to illustrate that, we have had 7,000 customers through the cook school in the last year.

I talk to a lot of people in this job and feel that this interest in provenance is now reflected in the supermarkets, which want to deliver what customers demand. Undeniably, when the professional chef community takes a subject to its heart, the public follows suit.

Do you generally think consumers today are buying more fresh produce than they were perhaps five or 10 years ago?

Looking at the Scottish berry market and the way it has exploded over the last few years, I would have to say yes. A decade ago, most of the soft fruit grown here was sent to processing, but now that is simply not the case.

Modern berry production techniques - polytunnels and other methods too - are ensuring that fruit is good and sweet throughout the year. When I was a kid, home-grown berries were only really sold for about two weeks a year, but so much has changed.

Kids are really key to growing the berry market - my own children love eating berries now because they know the fruit will be consistently excellent.

Yet again, we come back to this concept of the win-win situation - because consumers enjoy eating a premium product, growers can charge premium prices, which is also good news for them.

In your opinion, what does the fresh produce industry need to do to push up sales still further?

More information is needed in sharing the passion of chefs like myself. This is why AVA has started putting plenty of details on pack and organising events for people to come along and find out about the fruit.

When you’re working with great produce, you don’t need to have elaborate recipes and ideas, just opportunities to push the produce forward. This has been true for 20 years - but we can see things happening now, especially at the top end of the market.

However, at the bottom of the market people are becoming, if anything, even further divorced from the fresh market and increasingly reliant on processed food.

What we need is for this phenomenon we are seeing in fresh food at the top end of the market, among the middle classes, to trickle down to all the UK’s consumers.

How important are children in the battle to boost sales of fresh produce?

My children do not eat any processed food. My daughter even once spat out a jelly baby at a friend’s party! If you are rigorous about their diet in the early years, you can shape childrens’ palates.

Kids are the consumers of tomorrow, and this is why Angus Soft Fruits has done a lot of work in schools - it is important to get children enthused about food early on in their lives.