Sun, Shows & Bad Debts

Speciality Bites with

Paul Hargreaves

Chief executive of Cotswold Fayre

• Becoming a B Corp
• Top trend predictions for Christmas 2021
• Self-sacrifice: The importance of building a leadership legacy centred on others
• Undercover Boss
• Can/should bosses really be close friends with their staff?

Generally exhibitors seemed pleased with Food & Drink Expo up at the NEC last week, although the numbers were down on the Sunday (largely due to the heat wave), this was made up for on Monday and Tuesday

Certainly for us we saw a large number of customers and it was a great opportunity to show them some of our new products including the very well-received Jubilee/Olympic range.

One thing that made the show special for me was a superb meal out at Lasan in the Jewellery Quarter of Birmingham. I last went to this contemporary Indian restaurant four years ago. Since then it won Gordon Ramsey’s “Local Restaurant of the Year” and the coveted F word trophy. You can always tell a good restaurant when you are greeted at the door by name, and when you are five minutes late being taken to your table being brought not one but two ‘amuses bouches’.

If you are ever in Birmingham, make sure you go if only to see the magic towels at the end of the meal!

The following day I was on way to Barcelona for a quick visit to Alimentaria 2012 in Barcelona.  For the first time ever I missed my flight there due to traffic on the way to Heathrow, and my flight back was cancelled due to the General Strike in Spain, so all in all a bit of a shambles. However worth going for a couple of very productive meetings and a night turning into morning out in Barcelona.  What a fabulous city, where the restaurants don’t open until 9-9.30 pm!

Coming back to the UK it is our end of year, and the unpleasant time of year when we need to decide which of our bad debts are unrecoverable and need to be written off.  The largest one this year is a company trading as Plant and Harvest (JHL Holdings Ltd t/a) which went under just before Christmas and opened up immediately under a different name with the same stock and most of the same staff having lost all their debtors. 

That is all (sadly) quite normal. The interesting thing in this case is that one of the directors is Judith Price, whom I am reliably informed by an ex-employee is none other than the wife of Mark Price, CEO of Waitrose. If this is confirmed (and I am very happy to completely retract this if I hear otherwise) it seems the ethical trading policies of Waitrose didn’t make it through the family!  Can we have our money back please!