In the first of a new series profiling rising stars of the food and drink industry, Paul Trotman tells Liz Hamson how tasting an authentic curry in a Welsh hotel led to the creation of a £3m business
If you’ve eaten a curry in Wales recently, chances are that it was made by The Authentic Curry Company. One of the most successful small food businesses to have emerged from the country in recent years, the company now supplies 21 ready meal curries and 23 non-curries to a range of retailers including Asda, Tesco, Sainsbury and Spar in Wales as well as foodservice customers across the UK. And its ambitions don’t end there.
So just how has MD Paul Trotman transformed the company from one generating a solid but unspectacular £300,000 turnover four years ago to one that now turns over £3m?
The trained mechanical engineer attributes much of the company’s success to luck. In 1995, he was a marketer for a newspaper group when work took him to St David’s, where he first tasted the authentic curries of hotel proprietor and now business partner Dave Smith. The pair soon cooked up the idea to sell them to pubs. “Naively, we thought it was a brand new idea,” laughs Trotman. “When we started we realised there were masses of people doing it - but by that point we were committed.”
He believes working up recipes in a kitchen rather than in a production environment gave them an important edge. “Some larger competitors cook the sauce and meat separately - that’s standard. We cook the meat within the sauce.”
They also eschewed mass production methods, using 100 to 150-litre brat pans rather than the standard 400 to 500-litre kettles. “We made a conscious decision not to go down that road,” says Trotman. “Using the methods we use now, we can control and maintain product quality. There are those who think we should have gone mass production, but we continue to cook in small batches.
“That’s the reason we’ve developed so quickly, I believe.”
And develop quickly it has. Having started out making curries for foodservice customers from a small facility in Swansea, it began direct deliveries to wholesalers in 1996 and expanded its foodservice business with key customers such as Castellhowell Foods, which in a neat virtuous circle also supplies the company with meat.
Three years ago, it launched Authentic World Foods to broaden its repertoire from curries to other sauce-based dishes such as beef bourguignonne and mushroom
strogonoff. It then started to target the retailers. Again fortune played its part, says Trotman. “We were lucky to be developing at the same time the retailers targeted regional foods.”
The statistics speak for themselves. A year ago, the multiples represented 5% of business. Today, that figure is 30%. One of its biggest customers is Tesco, which as well as listing five curries also dishes out two World Food dishes in its in-store restaurants and, from this month, its staff restaurants.
The Authentic Curry Company is now poised to launch a new product line of high quality soups, though Trotman is reluctant to go into detail. Having spent the last 18 months creating a new board of directors, he is more than aware that its biggest challenge is to cope with such rapid growth.
“It happened so quickly,” he says. “We bought a 12,000 sq ft factory a mile away from our original facilities in Hirwaun, in the Rhondda Valley, two years ago and equipped it to cope with expansion. It was the biggest thing in my working life and I thought we wouldn’t have to do it again. But in less than a year, we were expanding again.”
Of the decision to pursue retail and foodservice, he is adamant it’s better to have fingers in more than one pie. Meanwhile, he is eyeing the wider UK market and not just as a Welsh company that makes curries.
“We are conscious of the fact we are Welsh, but the key is that our products taste good - whether here or over the Severn Bridge.”
If you’ve eaten a curry in Wales recently, chances are that it was made by The Authentic Curry Company. One of the most successful small food businesses to have emerged from the country in recent years, the company now supplies 21 ready meal curries and 23 non-curries to a range of retailers including Asda, Tesco, Sainsbury and Spar in Wales as well as foodservice customers across the UK. And its ambitions don’t end there.
So just how has MD Paul Trotman transformed the company from one generating a solid but unspectacular £300,000 turnover four years ago to one that now turns over £3m?
The trained mechanical engineer attributes much of the company’s success to luck. In 1995, he was a marketer for a newspaper group when work took him to St David’s, where he first tasted the authentic curries of hotel proprietor and now business partner Dave Smith. The pair soon cooked up the idea to sell them to pubs. “Naively, we thought it was a brand new idea,” laughs Trotman. “When we started we realised there were masses of people doing it - but by that point we were committed.”
He believes working up recipes in a kitchen rather than in a production environment gave them an important edge. “Some larger competitors cook the sauce and meat separately - that’s standard. We cook the meat within the sauce.”
They also eschewed mass production methods, using 100 to 150-litre brat pans rather than the standard 400 to 500-litre kettles. “We made a conscious decision not to go down that road,” says Trotman. “Using the methods we use now, we can control and maintain product quality. There are those who think we should have gone mass production, but we continue to cook in small batches.
“That’s the reason we’ve developed so quickly, I believe.”
And develop quickly it has. Having started out making curries for foodservice customers from a small facility in Swansea, it began direct deliveries to wholesalers in 1996 and expanded its foodservice business with key customers such as Castellhowell Foods, which in a neat virtuous circle also supplies the company with meat.
Three years ago, it launched Authentic World Foods to broaden its repertoire from curries to other sauce-based dishes such as beef bourguignonne and mushroom
strogonoff. It then started to target the retailers. Again fortune played its part, says Trotman. “We were lucky to be developing at the same time the retailers targeted regional foods.”
The statistics speak for themselves. A year ago, the multiples represented 5% of business. Today, that figure is 30%. One of its biggest customers is Tesco, which as well as listing five curries also dishes out two World Food dishes in its in-store restaurants and, from this month, its staff restaurants.
The Authentic Curry Company is now poised to launch a new product line of high quality soups, though Trotman is reluctant to go into detail. Having spent the last 18 months creating a new board of directors, he is more than aware that its biggest challenge is to cope with such rapid growth.
“It happened so quickly,” he says. “We bought a 12,000 sq ft factory a mile away from our original facilities in Hirwaun, in the Rhondda Valley, two years ago and equipped it to cope with expansion. It was the biggest thing in my working life and I thought we wouldn’t have to do it again. But in less than a year, we were expanding again.”
Of the decision to pursue retail and foodservice, he is adamant it’s better to have fingers in more than one pie. Meanwhile, he is eyeing the wider UK market and not just as a Welsh company that makes curries.
“We are conscious of the fact we are Welsh, but the key is that our products taste good - whether here or over the Severn Bridge.”
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