As they celebrate two special anniversaries, the owners of Hawkshead Relish Company look back over 25 years building their brand and using their voice and influence to put Cumbrian products on the map
Amid the blue uniforms and stainless equipment of Hawkshead Relish Company’s kitchen there are flashes of red. To one corner a huge, round pan contains a convex mound of shiny red cranberries that is slowly being sucked down like quicksand as the fruit beneath is boiled and reduced to gooey chutney.
Two further 300-litre vats are full of ingredients – one still at fruit and powdered spice stage, the other already cooked down. The air is lightly fragranced with fruit and spice.
As another tray is filled and the level begins to fall, Alison’s husband Peter pours in more jam taken from another huge pan where it has been cooked. There are no idle hands in this kitchen, so while Alison awaits the refill she turns in her seat to join Craig Noble in screwing lids on each small jar.
Alison and Peter are not the only married couple at Hawkshead Relish Company of course. The company was founded by Maria and Mark Whitehead who aren’t just the owners of their business but also, most would agree, figureheads of Cumbria’s artisan food industry. They have operated at Government level, Maria as a member of a board that wrote the 2016 white paper on exports and both of them taking part in trade missions to put local products on the international map. In 2011 they were awarded MBEs by Her Majesty the Queen for services to the food industry in Cumbria.
It all happens in a 16th century barn in a beautiful location a field away from the shore of Esthwaite Water and a few fields outside Hawkshead. The business moved here in 2007 and the team turns out around 6,000 jars of goodies every day.
Family circumstances brought the Whiteheads to Hawkshead and the food business.
Mark is from Bury and studied hotel and catering management at Blackpool. Their paths crossed when Maria’s family used to go for Sunday lunch to the former Dixon’s Arms, in Haverthwaite, which was run by Mark’s parents.
Mark got to know Maria’s brother, Thomas, through a shared interest in clay pigeon shooting. “They became friends, and every so often we would all go out. Then one night I was getting ready to go for a meal with them when Thomas said, ‘I’m not coming with you’. The penny dropped, then Mark was at the door to pick me up,” explains Maria. “We went for a lovely meal at The Porthole in Bowness. That was 1982 and we got married in 1984.” They plan to celebrate their ruby wedding anniversary in Japan in October.
“Before they took it on it was the sort of place where you could have a ham sandwich or a cheese sandwich or a ham and cheese sandwich and maybe a packet of crisps if you were lucky.
“With Mark’s parents and his sister and husband we turned it around into the first gastro pub in the Lake District. It had a formal dining room but we opened it up so you could have the same menu throughout, but only lunch, not dinner, in those days. It was a real sea change.”
“People queued up the street to get a table. It was madness,” recalls Mark. “We did 3,000 meals one Easter. The village was heaving, but only up to October half term. After that nothing happened.”
After Maria’s parents sold Dixon’s Arms, they bought Coffeetime Café, on The Square, but were soon ready to retire so Mark and Maria borrowed the money to buy the business in 1999. Today it is the Hawkshead Relish Company shop.
“Mark has always been interested in the history of food, where it comes from, its story. We were keen to change the café from serving standard fare and put Mark on to it,” says Maria.
During his research he found a recipe for Hawkshead Whigs, a very rich dough incorporating caraway seeds. Whigs, or wigs, peaked in popularity in the 18th century and were handed out on hiring days, when countryfolk came to the towns and villages to find work, and eaten on special occasions like Christmas and Easter.
Armed with a local recipe, Mark would get up at 6am to start baking in the café and served his Hawkshead Whigs with local cheeses and sausages from Waberthwaite. On trying to source good condiments to go with, however, he drew a blank.
“Anyone who had it with their meal at the café would ask if we sold it or where could they get it. So fairly quickly Mark started making more and jarring it. My dad made some shelving to display it and tell the story, and it flew out the door,” explains Maria.
Christmas apricot chutney, raspberry and vanilla jam and damson jam followed, but while every product have a story, not all have local origins.
“They persuaded me to try it and, oh my goodness, it just elevated the flavour so much, it blew my mind.” It resulted in Strawberry and Black Pepper Jam, a product that has customers hooked and coming back for more.
Maria is full of praise for Mark’s apparent inherent ability to ‘taste’ combinations ‘in his head’.
Hawkshead Relish’s distinctive black and white labels were the result of their having only a mono printer in the early days. They have resisted some retailers’ efforts – especially in the United States – to persuade them to change and add colour.
“A friend helped with our first labels in the 1990s which are horrendous now as styles have changed, but people know our brand now and they simply say what’s in the jar or bottle,” says Maria.
“It came in February, the worst time of the year for us. We knew that we just had to be busy through the year up to October half term and that would take us through to the following Easter when the visitors came back,” Maria explains.
In February, they were surviving on the last of the previous year’s success and had no prospect of reopening at Easter. Their daughters, Abbie and Izzy, were six and four at the time. “We had no customers and no money coming in, then the bank manager called to say he’d be visiting us. He’d seen our accounts. I burst into tears and said we wouldn’t be able to make our payment at the end of the month. We were convinced he was coming to foreclose us.
“We lived upstairs over the shop so it was real despair – we could lose the business and our home. That weekend we decided we would pitch doing more with the Hawkshead Relish brand, but we didn’t know how to get it to market.
“When the bank manager came, we gave him some to try. He said, ‘do a business plan and we’ll discuss it in a week’. He left, and I said to Mark, ‘what’s a business plan?’.
“We had a very basic computer and wrote a plan that, of course, said we would be billionaires in three years’ time. That still hasn’t happened. Once the bank manager picked himself up off the floor laughing, he agreed to give us a payment holiday. It was a huge weight off our shoulders because we still had somewhere to live and an incentive to work our socks off to make it work. We worked seven days a week, 14 hours a day for months and months.”
As demand grew they reduced the hours in the café to free up the kitchen so Mark could make chutney and jam – about ten different lines by them – using his single big pan on the stove top.
Further support came in the wake of foot and mouth, a Rural Recovery Fund grant helping to pay for their ‘big pan project’ to upgrade to a 150-litre vessel. It meant taking out a window of the shop to get it into the building. By this point Mark was making a couple of hundred jars a day while still getting up early to make bread for the café.
Exotic family holidays had to be sacrificed in the name of business. “One year we parked at the caravan site on the edge of village so Mark could still go into work. Another time we took the girls to Skelwith Bridge [four miles away] for a week. I remember driving them the long way round to the bottom of the Windermere and up the side of the lake and around to Skelwith Bridge to make them think we’d gone a long way. Then I had to do the same in reverse to go back home. It was years before they realised,” laughs Maria.
Their hard work paid off. On their first entry to the Great Taste Awards every product they entered won, then they were invited to take a stand at the Speciality Food Show. “We went to an awards dinner as part of the show. When they announced the winner of the Producer of the Year award was us we couldn’t believe it.
“It was as much a catalyst as the bank manager had been because up to then we had just been in Cumbria then all of a sudden the rest of the country was being told about us.”
“We agreed to supply four stores but the orders were still huge,” says Maria. “They didn’t quibble on price, but we very quickly realised that we couldn’t turn out enough so that’s when we started looking for new premises.”
The barn is part of the Graythwaite Estate, which owns much of the land to the west of Windermere, and at the time was derelict with a bare earth floor. Drawing on proceeds from Tesco, and with Maria’s dad as project manager, they turned the building into offices and a bespoke kitchen.
“Once we got in we decided we didn’t want to work with Tesco any more. It was a huge decision because it was 80 per cent of our turnover, but we felt it wasn’t who we were. We thought that at some point they would drop us or want us to upscale but would also want to dictate price and terms, which we knew we couldn’t do without losing quality. After a lot of sleepless nights we decided it wasn’t the route we wanted to take and that we’d rather work with independent stockists.
“Tesco wasn’t happy, but we didn’t have a contract. The lady we worked with moved on soon after and said that the person who replaced her probably would have delisted us, so we felt vindicated.
“It felt like the right thing to do. A lot of what we have done has been gut feeling. You ruminate, but once you've made the decision and it feels like a weight has been lifted, then it is the right decision.
It may surprise many to know that wholesale accounts for 85 per cent of the business. And it is not just in England. Last year a customer visited the shop who works for a supermarket chain in France and asked them for 20,000 bottles of their vegan Worcester Sauce to sell under its own brand. The retailer came back in June this year for a second order of 20,000 bottles.
Maria adds: “If you go right back to the beginning you have got to do something otherwise you are going to sink. That created a drive in us to be constantly moving forward, changing and evolving; you've got to make sure you're doing things a bit differently.”
A case in point is their now infamous Black Garlic Ketchup, which Mark developed, won a World Innovation Award for and is now being ‘emulated’ by other makers. “There is a certain amount of pride knowing that it has become a thing only because Mark developed it. It's frustrating and annoying but also flattering. Competition is healthy, and we wouldn't up our game if it was just us.”
Today, the Hawkshead Relish Company range numbers 100 different products. Mark, 64, and Maria, 61, have handed over day to day operations to managing director Jonathan Robb and Izzy, 28, runs the office. The four of them are directors. Abbie is happy running the Hawkshead shop.
The couple look back with pride on more of their achievements.
They created Cherries Jubilee Jam for The Queen’s platinum jubilee and a commemorative version to mark Her Majesty’s visit in 2008.
They also ran a competition with Hawkshead Primary School for the children to create a new recipe alongside teaching them about colour, texture and flavour of food, marketing and distribution. A batch was made of the winner’s entry, Jamtastic, for the school to sell and collect the proceeds.
Although the products are what they say on the jar or bottle, whether pickle or preserve, many are also versatile cooking ingredients. Five years ago Maria published her book, Embellish With Relish, which is about to go into its third reprint.
Explaining its aim, she says: “I want people to be able to use our products in different ways, in exciting family dishes, not just sitting on the side of the plate. They are little pots of flavour, all natural, full of good things and not processed, free from nuts, gluten, additives and preservatives, suitable for vegetarians and 90 per cent are vegan and they can be incorporated into all sorts of cooking.”
Furthering her cause, last year they developed a range of four slow cooker sauces while this year’s additions to the range include sweet dessert sauces.
Back in the kitchen, Izzy is overseeing operations while Jonathan tends to an issue at the company’s storage centre in Ambleside, where all products go for labelling and distribution.
With Jonathan in charge and her mum and dad stepping back you might say Izzy, as the next generation, is relishing the challenge.
hawksheadrelish.com
Top five products:
Black Garlic Ketchup
Westmorland Chutney
Raspberry and Vanilla Jam
Hot Beetroot Ketchup
Posh Pickle
Current favourite: Mango Chutney
“It was also Tom Kerridge’s favourite too. Lemon and lime give it a lovely freshness on the palate that then allows you to go back into your curry.”
Most versatile product: Hot Garlic Pickle
“It’s great on its own or served alongside curry, but you can also break it down with a pestle and mortar, add it to a tin of tomatoes with some water then let chicken breasts bubble away in it until the chicken is cooked for a lovely dinner. It’s also good between chicken wrapped in Parma ham.”
Most difficult product to develop: Black Garlic Ketchup
“The garlic has to cook for six weeks to get the depth of rich flavour and colour and it took a long time to get the flavour balance right. It’s expensive to make too.
Best-selling product: Raspberry and Vanilla Jam
The shrinking violet: Mild Indian Sweet Pepper Pickle
“I think people think it’s going to be hot because of the word Indian, but sweet peppers with garlic, ginger and other spices like fenugreek, but no chilli, mean it packs a punch of flavour without the heat. I just want people to try it.”
Good for a gift: Couture jars
As well as its distinctive hexagonal jars, some jams, chutneys and table sauces are available in couture jars, solid glass presentation pots with feet. “My mum would never have a jar on the table, it just wasn’t done, so we found an Italian maker who now can’t sell these jars to anyone else. Even mum approved of them on the table and I’ve seen people reuse them for candles. We put mum’s favourite orange flowers in them at her funeral.”
