The Wright Stuff…in pictures!

March 2018

This is a miscellany of images taken from my working life, in chronological order from my first job at the Leatherhead Food RA in 1980 to sharing a platform with Prince Charles at Lancaster House in 2002.

SW pretending to make chocolate using a ball mill, Leatherhead Food RA, winter 1980. If you look closely you will see the chocolate in the mill has set solid and bloomed, and the digital thermometer is not showing a temperature.

The lost art of starch moulding! Dirty, messy and slow but once the only way to deposit pectin jellies etc. No idea why I was doing this. Leatherhead Food RA. Nice hat.

SW in the semi-final of The Independent / Tattinger Cook Competition 1991, Cordon Bleu Cookery School in Marylebone Lane. My menuy was spinach stuffed with walnuts, cous cous and fetta with potato and parsnip cakelettes and a green salad with coconut and coriander dressing. I probably would have done better if I had practised my dishes in advance, even once. I remember a lot of free champagne and the young lady at the station next to me beheading a rabbit. I did not make the finals but I did get a nice apron (pictured)

From The Grocer, November 2004. Alaa Zaki did a fantastic job building the Lyme Regis brand and I was very happy to support him, our relationship lasting until Alaa sold his business to Glisten plc. In retrospect this was the creative and commercial highspot.

Launching Divine at The Groucho Club, September 1998. All I can remember of the evening was relief that we had raised enough money to pay for the first production run.

Helping develop the worlds first organic gin for Chris Parker and Charles Maxwell was definitely one of my more enjoyable projects.

Utkins organic vodka too! This from the Sainsbury’s magazine

The best thing about this conference is that we were based at the Grand Hotel Inter-Continental (*****), where fresh pastries were delivered to our rooms at exactly 4 0’clock every afternoon. A very enjoyable and productive few days in Paris.

Enjoy Organic was RHM’s attempt to launch a dominant, all-encompassing organic brand. The brand did not succeed commercially but we had great fun developing the range.

The other good thing about Enjoy Organic was that it introduced me to Harriet Rhys-Williams, one of the most intelligent people I have ever met (and a fellow Rolling Stones fanatic, as is her mother)

My first time speaking at Lancaster House, and thoroughly nerve wracking…

…not helped by my having to speak after Prince Charles, who made such an effective speech that no-one took in a word I said. On the extreme right is Elliot Morley, than at Defra.