Reprise the "King's Cottage" label for home use

Even if just for fun. A long-ish story. Back in about 1991 my Italian mother-in-law gave me a jar of tomatoes she'd dried in the sun, and had put them into oil with some herbs.

After reluctantly accepting them, I tried them on a hungry night and was blown away. In 1991 "dried tomatoes" were way less known than now.

I saw an opportunity, built some labels, made some and sold them.


It's where I learnt the challenge of scaling. To be honest, the selling was the easy bit. Domenic Mercuri - then of Walkerville Fine Foods, now of Siena - agreed to carry them to retailers and the orders flowed.

The trick was getting the volume going. Manual cutting, drying, packing etc would just not do it. Many thanks to mother in law Dora, Cousin Nadia and a few others. Nice lesson. Cheap.

It also showed me that as you try to get volumes up, there's a pressure on quality. Add to that I learnt first hand about the dangers of the food industry as I was selling plastic to Garibaldi Smallgoods when they had their food safety problems.


Anyhoo, this morning I made some chutney and thought "why not" yeh lame but I'm a lame old dad anyway.

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