Wiltshire Farm Foods Journal

Claire Tollit and her Quality Team cook and taste over 200 dinners and desserts each day to make sure your Wiltshire Farm Foods meals are perfect every time. And with four of them in the team, you can imagine how hectic their days must get! And what about the days spent tasting your least favourite foods…

Each day more than sixty lorries arrive at Wiltshire Farm Foods headquarters, but before anything is allowed to be unloaded Claire and her team get to work. Wiltshire Farm Foods take a look at what the team get up to in their working day.

Claire says: “We take samples of the ingredients like the meat and vegetables and cook them to check the quality of the ingredients before anything is allowed to be unloaded.”

The Wiltshire Farm Food quality team also check all dried ingredients are in perfect conditions, inspecting the lorries to make sure they are clean and hygienic. Once the ingredients have passed muster, Claire and her team - Michelle Dennison, Carrie Coveney and Sue Powell – inspect the meals as they are being prepared and frozen.

Then comes the final test in what is known as the TAYGO – taste as you go – and in our kitchen each batch of meals is cooked - just as you would at home - and tasted. The team cook one meal from each batch, cooking each in a microwave and conventional oven, following the exact instructions that our customer receives.

“We are continually tasting meals from six in the morning until ten at night, within two hours of them being made. It cannot go to the customer until we have approved it.

“We put the food through all the equipment our customers use to check that the cooking instructions work and that the times are accurate. Then we check it has the right ingredients and is the correct weight. We check texture and appearance, and sample every component in the meal.

“We taste up to 200 main courses and desserts every day, plus around 70 pie products. Obviously we don’t eat every one or we’d all be the size of a bus! “

After tasting every one of the 175 meals and desserts in the Wiltshire Farm Foods range hundreds of times, Claire’s favourite dish is lemon ginger chicken. She also loves stuffed pork loin with apricots and leeks. Sounds good!

She says: “All of our products are really good but my least favourite is liver. When you have 45 pallets of the same product to taste, you can imagine how we look forward to the new seasonal ranges. We love to have new food to eat.”

Remarkably when Claire and her team go home, they still look forward to making a meal for their families.

Says Claire: “We have a fantastic team and we live to eat. We love food and we hope our customers enjoy it as much as we do.”

What do you think of Claire’s choice picks, or our liver for that matter! Let us know…