Tanfield Food Company Ltd

Roger McKechnie and Keith Gill, who founded the highly successful Consett based snack manufacturer Derwent Valley Foods, makers of Phileas Fogg crisps, have launched new venture Tanfield Food. The new company, based in Consett, County Durham, produces gourmet convenience foods, made from high quality produce, which store for months at room temperature. Sold under the brand name `Look What We Found', the recipes are cooked in pouches in steam pressure cookers, after being prepared by gourmet chefs. The process has been used on the continent for a number of years, but is entirely new to the UK food industry, and the meals only need to be heated before serving. Recipes include dishes such as Duke of Northumberland Estate venison in damson sauce, or citrus braised Herdwick mutton, and the ingredients come from smaller local producers. Roger McKechnie said: "We use the best of the smaller producers, the sort of people to be found at farmers' markets, so the quality is very high and we know exactly which farm or estate the meat comes from in any product, so this adds a huge amount of credibility to what we are doing. "We are using our experience of the industry to take first class, local produce, have it prepared by highly trained chefs and then give it access to the kind of much wider market it deserves."