A rugby club in Aldershot - on a wet, cold and windy Sunday evening - is a long way to go for a decent sausage sarnie.
But I was invited by Paul Turner, co-proprietor of A Turner & Sons, for a live viewing of the moment when, last night on BBC 2’s Dragons’ Den, he netted an £80,000 investment from dragon Peter Jones.
Jones’ investment portfolio is wide but the dragon who famously put Levi Roots on the map really showed his understanding of the premium sausage category, and the value of having a story behind a brand, when he invested in Turner’s banger.
And Turner’s heritage is very real. As a consumer, it was reassuring to hear that there is still a real A Turner & Sons butcher’s shop in Aldershot with queues around the corner at Christmas, and to be told the name of “the woman who makes the sausages.”
It would have been music to Jones’ ears. As Turner himself told me immediately after the show: “I thought, ‘there’s got to be a place to have a genuine butcher on the shelves’. There’s ‘butcher’s style’ and ‘butcher’s choice’ but none of them are made by a butcher.”
Jones’ view was a far cry from that of fellow dragon, Duncan Bannatyne, who lacked faith in Turner’s USP. “To say to the general public ‘buy them because there’s a tradition of family butchery going back many many years’ doesn’t really cut it for the public because the tradition thing isn’t the thing that’s going to sell a sausage…” he said on the show.
With provenance increasing high on shoppers’ agendas, Bannatyne may well be kicking himself in the coming months, as Jones’ faith in Turner demonstrates just what you can achieve when you remember your roots. And as Jones says in the behind-the-scenes footage on the BBC 2 Dragons’ Den website: “I believe that, with Alf’s Sausages, Paul Turner could be the next Levi.”.
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