​

Weetabix Northamptonshire Food and Drink Awards

Cornwall has pasties, Lincolnshire has sausages and Yorkshire has rhubarb and while Northamptonshire has no defining product – yet! – it’s still a food and drink force to be reckoned with.

Indeed, with delicious cheeses to chocolate, mouth-watering pies to pickles, not to mention thirst-quenching beers, wines and spirits and the hundreds of great pubs, restaurants, cafés and chefs, it surely ranks as Britain’s all-round culinary county.

The Mallows Company, through its work with the annual Weetabix Food and Drink Awards, the Made In Northamptonshire (MIN) networking group and its partnership of the county’s promotional tourism campaign, Britain’s Best Surprise, has proudly play an integral role in supporting and promoting a wide range of Northamptonshire food and drink businesses for more than a decade, creating partnerships, encouraging excellence and prompting growth.

In addition, its role extends regionally through its work within the FEAST2 (Food Enterprise Advisory Support Team) project, and its seat on the Food and Drink Sector Strategy Board for SEMLEP (South East Midlands Local Enterprise Partnership).

For more details on the projects listed below, please click on the relevant link, or get in touch via our ‘Contact’ page:

• Made In Northamptonshire
• Weetabix Northamptonshire Food and Drink Awards
• FEAST2
• Britain’s Best Surprise

Northamptonshire’s food and drink claims to fame:

• Northamptonshire has twice the national average of producers and manufacturers, whose food output was worth over £600m in 2016 (Source ONS)
• Weetabix makes 70 million biscuits a week at its Burton Latimer factory – that’s more than 3.5 billion every year – with one box sold every second
• Warner’s, the internationally award-winning craft gin distillers founded in 2012, started on the family farm in Harrington with just one gin and now proudly produces 8 flavours – including its famous Rhubarb Gin which kick-started the pink gin craze –employs more than 40 people
• 95% of British householders owns a product containing a herb or spice from Northampton’s British Pepper & Spice
• Whitworth Bros Ltd, based in Wellingborough, process 1.65 million tonnes of wheat every year, making them the third largest flour miller in Europe
• Northamptonshire farming produces over 687 million loaves of bread, 32 million litres of vegetable oil, 300 million eggs and employs over 4,000 people (Source NFU)
• Between 1997 and 2016, output from food and drink manufactures rose on average by 57% across Northamptonshire (Source ONS)
• Guests at The Ritz and The Savoy tuck into chocolates made in Brackley by Belflair Chocolates
• Northamptonshire boasts over 20 quality food and drink festivals and fairs throughout the year – attracting tens of thousands of visitors to the county from across the country

For more details on the Awards, please visit www.northamptonshirefoodanddrink.co.uk or follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and on LinkedIn

Owing to the postponement of the 2020/21 Awards launch, prompted by the coronavirus outbreak, the competition is currently focussing on supporting the sector through the crisis and celebrating the amazing work of our many local food heroes. You can follow our regular updates on the social media platforms listed above.