SIX YEARS OF MAKING FOOD SAFETY LESS SCARY
W L INTERVEW
SIX YEARS OF MAKING FOOD SAFETY LESS SCARY
From nursery kitchens to more than 100 clients, Katy Elliott has turned years of first-hand experience into a consultancy built around one simple idea: food safety should be practical, understandable and far less intimidating.
Katy Elliott has spent the past six years helping food businesses navigate one of the least glamorous but most important parts of running a successful operation: food safety. Her route into consultancy was anything but conventional, beginning with nursery meals, developing into a national food manufacturing business and eventually leading to a career built around making complicated legislation simpler. We caught up with Katy to talk about how it all began, why food safety does not need to be frightening and why she still loves what she does.
You’ ve now been working as a food safety consultant for six years. Was this always the career you imagined for yourself?
Not at all. The path to becoming a food safety consultant was a long, hard slog, but looking back, every twist and turn brought me to where I am today. It actually started when my son Christopher attended a children’ s day nursery. I discovered that if the owner was not there to cook lunch, the children were being fed fast food, and that really did not sit well with me. It was not good for the children and, quite frankly, it was not a great advert for the nursery either.
We started working together to devise healthier meals. I worked with nutritionists and food scientists, looked closely at the ingredients being used by large food manufacturers and eventually decided to do what I had always done at home, which was cook from scratch. My whole family had always cooked that way, so it felt completely natural to me.
That eventually became much bigger than simply helping one nursery, didn’ t it? Yes. What began around my kitchen table developed into a proper food manufacturing operation. I went from making meals at home to cooking from a large manufacturing unit and supplying children’ s day nurseries across the country.
As the business grew, though, the food safety side became much more complicated. The larger the quantities we produced, the more difficult it became to cool the food within the times required by UK food safety legislation. The big
manufacturers had enormous blast chillers, but those were simply not affordable for a business like mine. At the same time, the paperwork was becoming increasingly cumbersome.
Was that the point when you first became really immersed in food safety?
Absolutely. I found myself in a very strange position. I had been producing safe food for years without a food safety problem, yet I was being told that the way I was cooling it was not compliant with UK legislation. I searched for somebody who could help me find a practical solution, but I really struggled.
Then I met Shaun Whitlock, who genuinely knows everything about food safety. He wanted to understand what I had been doing that had kept the food safe for the previous 15 years, so we spent a Saturday going through the whole process. We discovered that I was actually following the Irish food chilling system. With Shaun’ s guidance, I developed a complete food safety system around the way we were working and became, as far as I was aware, the only UK food manufacturer operating under that system.
And The Nursery Kitchen went on to produce more than a million meals. Why did the business eventually close?
It was incredibly labour intensive. The food was handmade, the paperwork was extensive and, despite producing more than one million healthy meals for children in nurseries around the UK, the business simply was not making enough money.
Eventually I had to close it, which was difficult, but I was not finished with food safety. In reality, everything I had learned through that business became the foundation for what I do now. I had experienced the legislation from the point of view of the person actually trying to run a food business, and that gave me a completely different perspective.
42 wirrallife. com