Yesterday The Grocer held its 2011 Own Label Food & Drink Awards, sponsored by PLMA and Cambridge Market Research.
Suppliers and retailers joined us at the Wyndham Grand in Chelsea Habour for insights from guest speakers including Asda marketing director Simon Eyles and Kerry Foods innovation kingpin David Hamilton – as well as plenty of Champagne and jibes about Gordon Ramsay from guest presenter Jay Rayner, food critic at The Observer.
No fewer than 50 gongs were handed out to reward the very best in own-label food and drink. And with a record number of entries, many categories were fiercely contested.
What victory meant to the winners was typified by the bombast of Tesco cheese buyer David Harman, who left clutching gold for the supermarket’s Finest Ossan Iraty in the speciality cheese (hard) category.
“We interviewed more than 1,000 people when we reviewed our speciality cheese offer,” he told The Grocer in a triumphant debrief.
“We wanted to know consumers’ perceptions of our cheese and were looking to outgun Waitrose. This is an exclusive line giving us a real point of difference.”
“Watch this space,” he added with a twinkle, when asked if he had any other aromatic surprises up his sleeve.
You can read a full list of the winners here. And there’ll be a whopping nine pages of coverage in this Saturday’s issue (available on thegrocer.co.uk to online subscribers).
The event certainly made an impression on Rayner, who tweeted afterwards that the glittering bash represented his “ Linda Lusardi moment”. We’re still trying to figure out what that meant today.
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