Prima Bakeries: Baking with Love

Our slogan or motto is Baked with Love from the Heart of Cornwall and the ‘Heart of Cornwall’ is very much geographically in this sort of area. 
 
We are an important community business, we employ 96 staff, I find it's crucially important for me to think about my staff and the importance of their work and feeding themselves and looking after their families. 

There has been a business here since 1978. It was established by the Buist family and was run by three generations of the Buist family until the Norton Family, that’s myself, purchased it in August 2010, but the good news was that the third generation of the Buist family stayed on as general manager and production manager and together over the last 10 years we've grown the business by 700% 

It's a tale of two families: it’s the Buist family that created the business and it's the Norton family with the Buist family, or third generation member, that have grown into what it is now. 
 
I'm managing director, my wife Lynne looks after all of the administration as well as being co-director and then I have my two children, Samuel and Emma, who both started at the bottom of the business seven to eight years ago and have now worked their ways up through the ranks into positions of management

When we first started we would serve two or three customers a day and one of the things we wanted to do is to actually build a facility for the local community in front of the bakery. 
 
So there are absolutely zero food miles; things are made in the factory and then literally sold through the shop. Now we've grown the business so that we will see 300-400 customers come through the shop each day. 
 
They can source everything from bread rolls to bread, eggs, milk as well as obviously hot pasties and frozen savouries.  
 

 Our first apprentice Owen was Young Baker of the Year and that's a national award that was awarded earlier this year. 
 
Then our fourth apprentice, Jason, who's just completed an apprenticeship was the first baker in the country to go through the new, improved, tougher Craft Baker Standards. So we've got two young men there who are very focused and switched onto baking.  
 
 We are very proud that Prima are training more apprentices in bakery than any other company in Cornwall.

 You can only have potatoes, onions, swede, although in Cornwall the Cornish call it turnip, but it is effectively called swede everywhere else, seasoning, butter if required and then beef. 
 
Traditional Cornish pasties only use skirt beef, that's a perfect part of the bullock, we don't use any other beef. 
 
The whole idea is that the assembly of the pasty is with uncooked, raw ingredients because what makes the Cornish pasty - once it’s crimped - is that it will bake those products inside the pastry case altogether. 
 
 

 Even though we've now grown from when we first started making 500 Pasties a week to last week we made 31,000 Cornish pasties, the actual method of production is still exactly the same. 
 
So whilst yes, we will use some machinery to help us process our vegetables, the actual putting of the pasty together, the crimping of the pasty which is obviously such an important part, is all done by hand in the same way as it has been done for 200 years. 
 
Even if we made 310,000 pasties next year, we would still keep the same method. We don't want to go down the route of machine-made that would lose a lot of its heritage, a lot of the product value and we think that the way we do it now is as good as it gets and therefore it doesn't need to change. 
 
 

Local provenance is something that is really growing in interest and people are really keen on and I think Covid has made people focus even more on food chains as a result of some of the shortages we saw in supermarkets when lockdown started.
 
We always wanted to produce a typical, very Cornish product and it is important that, wherever we can, to actually use local ingredients, so for example all of our meat for our Pasties is supplied to us from a wholesaler less than a mile away. They source their beef primarily from the West Country. 
 
We have a farmer who grows all of our potatoes, those fields overlook St Michael's Mount down at the Marazion, so I know exactly where my potatoes are being grown to our specification.
 
We have another farm in the same area that supplies us with all of our suede and onion, so we've pretty much got the contents of our Pasties covered within a 10 mile radius of where the factory is.
 
 

I think that our attention to quality and provenance, and the fact that we are now, I believe, 7th or 8th largest Cornish pasty maker in the world, it is still very much a handmade product made in exactly the same way as they have done for 200 years. 
 
That's reflected in the awards that we've won for our product, which a lot of people are starting to be aware of. There's the Cornish Pasty World Championships at the end of the Cornish Pasty week every year and we have come in the Top Three, seven years out of the last nine. 
 
 

It's been a lot of hard work since the first five years there have been a lot of 60 to 70 hour weeks, putting your life and soul into it. 
 
I'm really proud that we've come through all of that process to now have a business that employs a lot of staff, gets excellent feedback and has a good reputation for its products, provides the family with a good living and also potentially provide the next generation of the Norton family, Emma and Sam, with the opportunity to continue to build this business and continue to do what we do: Feed Cornwall.