News

A DOWN to earth food business is hoping to turn its ‘Nowt Poncy’ name into a global brand. When Managing Director Jools Abel drives his distinctive liveried van around he gets people stopping him all the time to comment on the name.
Jools and his wife and Operations Director Karen, from Water in Rossendale, set up The Nowt Poncy Food Company in July 2016 and in the first year of trading it was shortlisted for three business awards including the Valley at Work organised Rossendale Business Awards.

They have just returned from The Farm Shop & Deli Show at Birmingham’s National Exhibition Centre where their range of sauces with its distinctive brand and labelling went down a storm with the visitors. The brand has been trademarked in 11 different business sectors from hotels to accommodation, books to insurance, as the couple can see a global future for the ‘Nowt Poncy’ title.

Jools is a time-served mechanical engineer spent 25 years in the photographic equipment repair industry, but he has always had a passion for cooking. Karen was a headteacher and met Jools when they both attended Manchester Polytechnic in 1987. That was the time when nouvelle cuisine was at its height and the couple found themselves searching for restaurants that still served ‘real food’.

The Birmingham exhibition was over three days, had 30,000 attendees and featured 1,500 exhibitors.

Jools said: “I also got asked to showcase our sauces to a range of six industry experts in a Dragons’ Pantry. The sauces are all based on authentic recipes so the tomato and basil tastes like it was made in Italy, our Creole is true to its New Orleans origin and our curry is to a North India recipe. Our range tastes like you made it yourself, is low in sugar, salt, saturated fats, has no active preservatives and is low in calories. I wanted to use the minimum of ingredients to achieve the best flavour and not use anything poncy; just great produce and a little time and love.”

Four out of the five sauces are suitable for vegans and vegetarians, coeliacs and people with a gluten intolerance. Nowt Poncy sauces are available in Simply Veg in Rawtenstall and Riley’s Butchers in Crawshawbooth, at Benedicts of Whalley, Bowland Food Hall, Clitheroe, and at Castle Howard in North Yorkshire; the products are also sold online. The sauces were devised in Jools and Karen’s kitchen in Water and are now manufactured in a commercial kitchen in Blackburn.

Nowt Poncy will be exhibiting in the Taste Lancashire marquee at The National Festival of Making in Blackburn on May 12 and 13.
For more information log on to www.nowtponcy.co.uk

 

Story by Catherine Smyth

That’s the 2017 R-Awards done and dusted!

Valley at Work won’t be starting on the 2018 R-Awards for a few months, and this gives us the ideal opportunity and space to produce the first Rossendale Food & Drink Guide. This will be a printed booklet that celebrates the best food and drink businesses in the area. Rossendale has a wealth of great food and drink businesses, and its about time we showcased them!

To be clear, we’re not just talking about pubs, cafes, restaurants and takeaways, the guide will include retailers and local producers. We want to showcase every type of food and drink business.

Our aim is to publish the guide early in 2018, printing 1000 copies and backing it up with a special page featuring an interactive map on the Valley at Work website. Each featured business will get a special window sticker to celebrate their inclusion in the guide.

Choosing Businesses for the Guide

We were looking for a relatively simple way of selecting the featured businesses that didn’t involve either an entry form, a judging panel or a public vote. In the end we decided that to feature in the 2018 guide, a business would have to:

• Score at least 4 on their most recent Food Hygiene rating.
• Be rated highly by their customers on Facebook and/or Trip Advisor – we were looking for recent ratings of at least 4 (out of 5) by several customers.
• Give us permission to feature them in the guide.

Putting the Guide Together

We have a list of 72 businesses that meet the first two criteria, and we are about to get in touch to seek their permission to feature them in the guide. There is no charge for inclusion, as the costs of producing the first guide the support of Rossendale Borough Council and several R-Award sponsors.

When we have gathered the permissions we need, we will contact each featured business to ask for some simple information to include in the guide, along with any photographs and logos they can let us have. We will then assemble the guide and get it published.

The Future

We’re hoping that we will be able to publish this guide annually, and that it will lead to a much larger annual celebration of our local food and drink business community. Our view has always been that a Rossendale Food & Drink Festival would be a great thing for the area, but only if it happens across all of our food and drink businesses. A one or two-day outdoor festival (like they do in Clitheroe and Accrington) would be brilliant, but a fortnight of coordinated events in the food and drink businesses community would be more sustainable and have a greater impact on the local economy.