Can you explain your background in the produce trade? How did you end up a television and radio celebrity?

I started out as a market trader at New Covent Garden Market, supplying all the top chefs in London with fresh produce. I was really good at understanding the fruit and veg needs of the capital’s best chefs, and still am. Local produce is a buzzword now, but I was talking about it 20 years ago.

A freelance journalist from Caterer and Hotelkeeper magazine interviewed me in 1997 and then put me in touch with Radio 4, who then invited me to co-present a show called Veg Talk, which is still running today.

As a result, I was invited on to television - I was the original presenter of BBC’s Saturday Kitchen, and was then approached to co-present MasterChef, as the guys who made it were really after someone who knew a lot about food. Now, of course, we also do Celebrity MasterChef and MasterChef Goes Large.

As well as presenting MasterChef, I write two articles a month, for Good Food and Olive magazines.

You are still closely connected with the produce industry - can you explain how?

I am managing director of Secrets Direct, based at Secrets Farm in Surrey, which grows and distributes a wide range of home-grown produce to top chefs in the capital.

I also work with recruitment and HR practice MorePeople on consultancy projects in the fresh produce industry. For example, at the moment I am conducting workshops at Tesco via MorePeople, explaining to its fruit and veg buyers how a chef would perceive Tesco produce.

There is a danger they might start to see fruit and veg as a commodity, so I show them how and what a chef at the top end of the market buys, and hopefully they go away and look at the category a bit differently.

I have also done promotions for the Jazz apple recently, which is being grown in Kent. I split my time between London and Whitstable, and it is just great to see working fruit orchards down in Kent again.

What are the benefits for a chef working with Secrets?

As long as there are restaurants, we will always need wholesalers. However, within wholesale, everyone has access to the same produce, and there is no unique selling point. Top-end chefs now want to deal directly with the farm and the producers, and that’s where a business like Secrets comes in.

It is a very tough kind of business to operate, and as a result we are very unique - it is difficult for a farm to grow a wide range of produce and also have a decent credit facility, and on top of that you need someone who knows the restaurant trade very well and is on speaking terms with the movers and shakers in the cheffing world.

Secrets has 250 acres of production and commissions produce from 30 other farms. We have four vans going into London every day.

We don’t want to expand the restaurant side of the business; instead, we are looking at internet shopping, so that people can have the same produce at home that Gordon Ramsay is using in his restaurant.

Secrets also has a stand at Borough Market and is putting product into Selfridges. The latter has a very dynamic food team in place, and I believe in two years will operate the most celebrated food hall in London. As a result, we are thinking of expanding the retail side of the business, supplying into shops and cafes and the like.

There are a lot of food shows on TV at the moment - do you think they have made a difference to the nation’s eating habits?

MasterChef is unique among those shows, in that it genuinely is a cookery competition being filmed, not a television show subsequently made into a competition.

However, I have no idea if MasterChef is encouraging people to cook more - people are certainly watching it, but people that stop me on the street mainly want to talk about the celebrities that are on the show, rather than the recipes themselves.

As a nation, we no longer cook for necessity. There is a huge amount of cash-rich, time-poor people out there who cook at the weekends, when they have time. Fifty years ago, mum cooked for the family because she had to, but nowadays people cook because they enjoy doing it.

I also wonder if there is an element of cooking shows being so popular because we like watching it rather than doing it? I seriously doubt my gran would have wanted to watch somebody cook on television, because she had to do it every night herself! We also tend to cook from recipes nowadays, which our mothers and grandmothers never used to do. I have been berating people for ages for cooking from recipes - as a nation, we are losing our skills in the kitchen.

What is the key to getting people cooking and eating fresh, seasonal food again?

That’s a tough one. It’s got to start at a very young age - we need cooking, not home economics, back on the curriculum, and we have to teach youngsters how to enjoy cooking and sustain their interest.

We have to get rid of the ironing board syndrome associated with the kitchen. Always make sure there is plenty of wine and beer in the fridge and a CD player on the shelf - in other words, make it into a fun room that keeps your interest, not a chore.

What I’ve done to get my kids interested is take them to supermarkets, play games where they have to identify different veggies, and then get them to buy them, take them home and cook them, which is the most important part. My kids are now happy to work in the kitchen, because I have taught them that it’s fun, and not a chore.

Having said that, I think fruit and veg is just going to get bigger and bigger as a category in the restaurant trade, and also in people’s home cooking repertoire.

What’s next in the pipeline for Gregg Wallace?

There are two more series of MasterChef on the way and at the moment we are even talking about a Professional MasterChef series.

I have a second book coming out in January, and I also want to spend more time at the farm, pushing the business forward. It’s a really busy period at the moment.