HOW TO USE AWARDS PART 2: JUST FOOD

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HOW TO USE AWARDS PART 2: JUST FOOD

Here's part two of the awards' series. Part one is here

One organic food company who have done well over the years in the Blas na hEireann, the Irish Food Awards, is Midelton's Just Food.

(pic courtesy of the one and only Cork Billy)

“Winning at Blas na hEireann has been of enormous benefit to us. It helped a lot going into the buyers in the multiples” according to Deirdre Hillard of the Midelton-based company.

“We got gold medals 3 years in a row in blas. The fact that its a blind tasting really adds to the validity when your approaching someone. I was coming from being a small local producer delivering a weird looking soup to stores - it was like 'this one down from the mountains with her knitted hat'. But being able to say that this soup, in a blind tasting by experts, won the top national prize really helped. And the medal winning soups are now our best sellers,” says Hillard, who's company employs 10 and has a turnover of E1.2 million. Not bad for a knitted hat mountain woman.

“This year we have sought and achieved local listings with Dunnes, Superquinn and Tesco: winning the Blas na hEireann awards was a core part of our presentations to each client, and I have no doubt these awards helped us secure all of the listings.”

She continues “I personally do in store tastings on a very regular basis and new customers more often than not tend to choose the product varieties that have award stickers displayed - the stickers are definitely positively received.”

But its not just Blas na hEireann. Just Food have won other awards and, importantly, made direct use of them: “We won a branding award [the Brand Bursary] last year and it was just fantastic for us. Vard Partnership, the food and drink branding company, ran a competition with a prize of E10,000 of packaging and design work for a food and drink company in Ireland. We won, based on our products and our need for good packaging. Our old black and white labels meant we weren't taken seriously by multiples.”

There was another problem: “We were invisible to the customer when we were on the shelves. I would sometimes do a tasting in stores that had our products for 3 years and people, who loved the soup when they tasted it in the store, hadn't actually seen it before. Now, you can see it, the cardboard sleeve helped us stand out. This award has definitely upped our sales, made supermarkets like Tescos and Dunnes look at us more.”

I asked her was it hard to change a look she'd had for so long? “It was actually, we were attached to the old label, emotionally. We felt we were throwing away an unruly child. Some customers gave out, said it was gone corporate.”

All told, however, she's happy with the new look. What's more, “because the branding award was a specific and practical award, it really helped. We got a new design, new tub, new cardboard sleeve. It meant we could express the personality of product. Otherwise I might have just gone off and spent the money on a piece of machinery or something, which wouldn't have done as much for us as a company.”

As we saw last posting with the National Organic Awards, awards, it seems, are what you make of them. Some companies ignore them altogether and don't enter; others get them and do little with them; and a few use the awards to help their products sing like sirens. And with a national and gobal economy in such a mess, who wouldn't set off the sirens given half a chance?

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