24 Jul 2014 Colman’s mustard: tickling taste buds for 200 years
It’s almost impossible to hear the name Colman’s without thinking mustard. Hardly surprising when considering that this iconic brand has been around for 200 years.
It was 1814 when flour miller, Jeremiah Colman, took over a mustard manufacturing business based on the river Tas, four miles south of Norwich. At the time, George III was on the throne and Napolean was losing the Battle of Waterloo to Wellington. By 1851, the Colman family business boasted 200 employees and moved to its present location at Carrow in 1862.
In 1866, the iconic red and yellow was introduced to the Colman’s label. That same year, Colman was appointed mustard maker to Queen Victoria and Colman’s was granted the Royal Seal, which can still be seen on all Colman’s products today.
As well as being very good at making mustard, Jeremiah was an outstanding employer. In 1864, a full 20 years before parliament made education compulsory, he built a subsidised school for his employee’s children. He also set up a kitchen to provide hot meals at affordable prices – today’s equivalent of a workplace canteen.
In 1903, Colman’s bought rival mustard manufacturer Keen & Son, making Colman’s a household name and spawning the saying, ‘keen as mustard’.
In 1995, the company was bought by Unilever. Today, Colman’s is about more than just mustard. There’s a range of products – from gravies and recipe mixes to condiments and pour-over sauces.
Big marketing
Colman’s is marking its 200th anniversary celebrations with the launch of a new £4.8 million marketing campaign, aimed to highlight the role that it plays in the British family meal.
The first stage of the campaign will focus on the Colman’s dry packet sauces, which generated over £46-million in value sales in 2013.
Joanna Wright, brand manager for Colman’s Dry Packet Sauces at Unilever UK, says: “Food is at the core of British family life and Colman’s is a brand that’s been supporting proper British meals for the last 200 years. With the strapline ‘meals that say it all’, the new advert demonstrates the way we use food to express ourselves; whether it’s to reward, sympathise, support or comfort. British food made using Colman’s is at the heart of the story, creating meals that communicate what we reserved Brits can’t always say in words.
“The 200th anniversary is a significant milestone for the brand - confirming that it continues to offer a quality and taste that families know they can rely on. Over the years, the range has expanded significantly from its launch as a mustard brand in 1814 and now offers a range of recipe mixes, condiments and gravies, spanning three categories and contributing over £89-million in total value sales.”
Keeping Colman’s English
It’s easy to take heritage food brands for granted. Certain products have been a feature of British kitchens for a surprisingly long time. Colman’s English Mustard falls into that category, alongside Frank Cooper’s Oxford Marmalade, Lea & Perrins Worcestershire Sauce, Sarson’s Vinegar, Tiptree jam and Lyle’s Golden Syrup.
Yet, less than a decade ago, the distinctive yellow condiment in the distinctive yellow packaging almost lost the right to describe itself as English.
Mustard is England’s only commonly grown spice. Although small-scale mustard-growing continues in parts of Yorkshire and the Cotswolds, it is mainly concentrated in its traditional heartland, East Anglia.
This year, Colman’s will be supplied by farmers in Cambridgeshire, Lincolnshire and Norfolk, areas affected less adversely than many by the extreme weather conditions of the beginning of the year. For most of those growers, mustard forms part of a traditional fenland rotation, which also includes potatoes, sugar beet, onions, wheat and rape; mustard growing remains a feature of a type of mixed cropping that was once widespread in areas of England but is now much less so.
In 2014, grower Michael Sly sowed about 95 hectares of mustard on his 1,600-hectare fenland farm, east of Peterborough. Sly is the chairman of English Mustard Growers (EMG), an initiative formed in the aftermath of a disastrous mustard harvest in 2007, which saw yields, which should ideally be a tonne an acre, fall to half that level. At that point, a third of the farmers who had formerly supplied mustard seed to Colman’s gave up.
Colman’s mustard is made of a combination of brown and white mustard seeds: the two seed types complement each other to create English mustard’s distinctive kick, which comes from an initial hit supplied by the white mustard seeds and a longer-lasting impact from the brown.
This pungency de-rives from compounds called isothiocyanates, which are released during the digestive process. Their parent compounds, glucosinolates, may have cancer-fighting properties.
Formerly the white mustard seeds used by Colman’s were grown exclusively on English flatland farms, and the brown seeds partly sourced elsewhere, most of them imported from Canada. After 2007, Colman’s was faced with the prospect of importing far more foreign seeds, jeopardising its right to continue labelling its mustard “English”.
With the support of Unilever, Colman’s’ parent company, Sly and 10 fellow growers set up EMG to avert this outcome. They aim to produce an annual harvest in the region of 1,500 tonnes of mustard seed to sell to Colman’s.
From the outset, EMG’s target was Colman’s bicentennial year. “Our intention was to secure the English crop, boost the yield and improve the seed in time for Colman’s bicentenary in 2014,” says Sly.
With nine new growers having joined EMG since its inception, including one this year, and yields up to 0.95 tonnes an acre in 2013, those aims are very close to being realised. Predictably, it has not been an easy process. Sly points to “dogged determination” throughout what he describes as a “hard but fruitful journey”, in which this cooperative of regional farmers has shared best practice and promoted efforts to restore the seed breeding stock.
Read more here at http://www.thefield.co.uk/