Client Spotlight – Grants of Speyside
Traditional Scottish Products & Fresh Meat Supplier for Nearly 200 Years
- September 11, 2023
- 8:33 am
" Because our NutriCalc subscription is a fixed annual cost, it's easy to budget for and doesn’t restrict our NPD in the way that lab analysis would if we were having to pay for every sample, plus it saves valuable time "
Grants of Speyside, a traditional Scottish products and fresh meat supplier for nearly 200 years, have found NutriCalc®’s fixed cost, immediate results and meat labelling features the recipe for success.
We spoke to Grants of Speyside General Managers, Louise Shearer & Kim Lovatt.
Tell us about your business?
Grants of Speyside are a six-generation family business supplying the finest quality traditional Scottish products and fresh meat.
As well as manufacturing our own Grants range of award-winning haggis, black pudding, burgers, and sausages, we supply popular meat cuts including beef, chicken, lamb, pork, and venison.
Grants rose from humble beginnings in 1824, when founder John Grant started the business by selling meat from a horse and cart.
Today, the business operates from a purpose-built factory based in Grantown-on-Spey in the heart of the Scottish Highlands’ Cairngorms National Park.
Who is your customer base?
We supply wholesalers as well as quality hotels, restaurants, cafes, retailers, and caterers.
Historically our customer base has been concentrated in the Scottish Highlands, but more recently we’ve been supplying to retailers and foodservice outlets throughout the UK due to increasing demand for our Grants traditional Scottish product range.
We also sell direct to end consumers via our onsite factory shop and online shop.
Why did you decide to use NutriCalc?
We previously used lab analysis but it’s quite expensive due to the cost per sample, so in 2016 we decided to try NutriCalc to save money and we’ve been using it ever since.
Also, when creating our manufactured products, which involves tweaking recipes, it’s useful for us to have the nutrition information immediately, rather than having to wait for the results to come back from a lab.
How has NutriCalc benefitted your business?
As well as saving us money and NPD time, because we’re on the annual subscription plan, we know exactly how much outlay we’ve spent and need to build into our annual budget, to get this essential product labelling information.
If we had to send each product away for lab analysis, we’d be more reluctant to make new products due to the individual expense, so having a fixed cost also helps with our product development.
How do you find using the software?
We’re on the Professional Plus plan, which is ideal for our needs due to its official meat calculation features.
The built-in raw meat cut ingredients with VL ratios make it quick and easy for us to generate the nutrition information for our raw meat product labels, such as a fillet steak.
Similarly, for our wide range of manufactured meat product recipes, we love the ability to add in ingredients such as seasoning, QUID the ingredients and highlight any allergens, so we’re generating everything we need from the software to put on our labelling.
It’s Scottish Food Fortnight, so tell us about some of your traditional Scottish products?
At Grants we’re all about traditional Scottish food!
Our traditional Scottish haggis and black pudding products have both received Great Taste two-star awards, and also won gold and silver awards from the Scottish Federation of Meat Traders.
These recipes were created nearly 200 years ago by Jessie Grant, wife of founder John Grant, in the Royal Burgh of Dornoch in the Scottish Highlands. We still use the same family recipes as when they were created five and a half Grant generations ago, and we always will.
Renowned for its outstanding flavour and texture, we consider our haggis the best version of Scotland’s national dish you can buy. It’s in high demand from some of the finest restaurants in Scotland, to small delicatessens all over the UK.
Similarly, our black pudding is extremely popular with restaurants, deli shops, cafes and larger supermarkets.
We also have end consumers coming from far and wide with orders to take back to their friends and relatives when they know they are going to be passing nearby to our factory premises.
Some of our more recent product developments geared for local Scottish tastes include our sweet chilli pork & Irn-Bru sausages.
How have you found NutriCalc’s customer support?
The customer service team are very helpful and responsive, and always give us the best possible service, which is exactly what you want.
How would you sum up your experience using NutriCalc?
Because our NutriCalc subscription is a fixed annual cost, it’s easy to budget for and doesn’t restrict our product development in the way that lab analysis would if we were having to pay for every sample.
Also, not having to wait for the nutrition results to come back from a lab saves us valuable product development time.
The official meat calculation features are ideal for our specific labelling needs as a raw and processed meats supplier.
For more information on Grants of Speyside, visit: https://grantsofspeyside.co.uk/