Sourcing Locally Selling Nationally

• Mark Gilchrist

• Game for everything

• Cooking game

• Game processing

• Cooking demonstrations

• Private catering work

From Field to Plate

• Cooking, keeping the link between the source and consumption

• Market demand for game is increasing

• Major factor is the link between source and end user

• It has a short production chain so it is traceable, fresh, usually local. Can be sold nationally if market was created

From Field to Plate

• People reaction to the link between source and consumption

• Two main reactions • Some people love the provenance,

so a definite plus• This is great for me as I can often

tell people who shot it and where

From Field to Plate

• The other reaction from people less aware

• They tend to let anthropomorphic ideas govern their choice of food

• You find that if you take these people though the whole process of skinning and cutting they change their mind

Understanding and Living With Seasonality

• People wrongly believe that if it is in season it can be shot

• Weather conditions, feeding patterns, crop cycles and human behaviour are large factor

• There so many expectations to the law that allow game to be shot out of season that the law its self can be misleading

Understanding and Living With Seasonality

• If you understand the patterns of seasonality in game then you can use it to make you money

• Profits arise in game dealing not from increasing you output price but by lowering your input price.

• With this in mind profits can be by taking advantage in market trends

• The price of wood pigeon can rise from 5p to 25p in days

What Makes It Great Food?

• This is a question I love to answer • My passion for game stems from my love

of birds and wildlife and their surroundings, for me if I can’t kill it I don’t want to eat it

• The experience of creating food from something I have harvested give me a love of that food I wouldn’t get from anything else

What Makes It Great Food?

• It is wild

• This means no chemicals

• No intensive rearing a

• No possibility of cruelty

• It more free range than Free range

• It is not intensively bred

What Makes It Great Food?

• Healthy

• Very low in fat

• Rabbit starvation

• Low Bio acclimating toxins

• Very high in trace elements

What Makes It Great Food?

• Cheap source of meat

• filet steak £28 per kilo woodpigeon £10 per kilo

• You can make pigeon taste nicer than fillet steak

• Pheasant vs. chicken (poulet bresse)no contest

What Makes It Great Food?

• Sustainability and environmental pluses

• You are helping the environment by eating game

• Wild game is harvested naturally in harmony with nature

• As for reared game, shoots spend 5 times the income of the RSPB on conservation

Why is Game meat important to the food industry?

• My initial response to any one pondering this question is name a sector in the meat industry that has the potential for such growth? I can’t think of one

• This is an area of sales that could yield, high profits and improve the range of products for any retailer

Why Is Game Meat Important to the Food Industry?

• Game has been fundamentally miss-marketed for years. In using the term marketing I include the style in which it is cooked and the finished product which is the image. 

• I have seen how interested consumers become once they understand that it easy to cook, tastes fantastic, is reasonably priced, is sustainable and the ultimate slow food

Where Do I See the Next Opportunities in Game

Developing?

• Marking game as a sensible clean cut every day life style choice and will see large increases in raw sales.

• Customer base becomes more wide spread as you find people that were put off by game but are become attracted to it with good marketing.

Why Is Game Meat Important to the Food Industry?

• The pricing structure of game in supermarkets has to be addressed in order to see game sales rise as it spreads to a wider markets.

• The cooking of game has to be changed, the era of over hung game is in the past where is belongs along with pickled walnuts.

• If this requires cooking demonstrations and articles is magazine’s then I will start to campaign for it.

Why Is Game Meat Important to the Food Industry?

• Following new meat hygiene legislation game is now produced in ways that minimises the over powering taste that people wrongly associate with game cooking.