Not everything here at West Country Olives always goes as smoothly as we would maybe like it too.
Today, I’m going to tell you one of our early problems that we encountered.
Let’s journey back a couple of months, we were creating our flavour blends and experimenting with different combinations to see what would appeal to people the most. We wanted to have as varied a range as possible so we could please everyone
One of these flavours was “Mixed Olives with Mature Cheddar”.
This flavour was a mix of Green Pitted and Kalamata Olives with small chunks of West Country Barnstormer Cheddar.
Put simply, we loved this idea, not only was it completely unique to us, but it also tasted great and we felt that it was the perfect blend to use as our ‘flagship’ flavour.
So, we pushed ahead with it and produced our very first full batch of olives. We mixed 10kgs of Green Pitted Olives, 5kgs of Kalamata Olives and 2.5kg of West country Barnstormer Cheddar, we then added some lemon juice, rapeseed oil and some herbs to pull the flavours together.
We had dedicated labels printed for this flavour so they were added to the outside of the packs and then we gas flushed them all and put them on the shelf ready to be sent out as our first samples to our customers.
Everything was looking great, our first flavour was done, West Country Olives was no longer just a concept!
It wasn’t until a few days later that we realised there was a problem.
All of the windows in the packs were covered with a sort of white smear, completely blocking the olives from view.
It just looked really messy, not what you want for your main flavour.
A short while after that we opened some packs to see what the condition of them was like to find the cheese and olives were not working well at all. The Kalamata Olives in particularly had begun to taste very peculiar and the cheese and rapeseed oil were creating a white paste. That explained the smearing.
It quickly dawned on us that we simply couldn’t use this flavour, how could we launch a brand-new business with this at the forefront?
Obviously, we couldn’t go ahead with it and that’s why you haven’t seen this flavour advertised.
This was quite disheartening right at the start of the process, to have the flavour we were all most excited about, fail.
We only want to produce the best quality olives that we possibly can and that is why we made the call to cut it out.
So, why am I telling you all of this?
Surely I should just be telling you about all the things that go right?
That’s not the way we see it at West Country Olives, we want to be completely upfront with our customers and that means telling you the good, bad and the ugly.
We don’t get it right every time, no one does.
But you as a customer are always at the forefront of the decisions we make.
We only want to deliver you the best possible product and service and if that means cutting product lines that aren’t up to scratch; then that’s what we will do.
Every pack that leaves us must meet these high standards.
These standards that we set ourselves are at the core of this company, and always will be.
Thank you for reading.
William Price
West Country Olives
