This year’s awards categories showcase the very best that Northern Ireland has to offer and winners will be celebrated at the Crowne Plaza Belfast on 24th March 2017. The awards are free to enter and we encourage companies from across the industry to apply online for the categories below:

• Agri-Food Supply Chain Excellence Award
• Services Sector Award
• Export Excellence Award
• Outstanding Contribution Award
• Large Product Award
• Medium Product Award
• Small Product Award
• Food and Drink Sector Skills Award
• Excellence in Food Safety Award
• People’s Choice Award (Sponsored by Food NI)

To find out more about the categories and submit your application, please visit the dedicated awards website.

Applications close on Friday 24th February 2017.

Pictured L-R: Category partner Tom Worth of Teknomek, award winner Pauline Gordon of Linden Foods and chef John Torode

Linden Foods picked up ‘BEST NEW PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT’ at the recent 2017 Food Management Today Industry Awards for their hand wrapped, mouthwatering M&S Pork Saltimbocca

The award winning County Tyrone meat manufacturers are no strangers to success and continue to dazzle judges with their delicious portfolio of beef, lamb, pork and chicken products.

In the company of renowned chef and TV broadcaster John Torode, the 2017 FMT Industry Awards brought the top names of the UK food industry together to reward the best products, as voted for by readers of the magazine and judged by industry experts. Around 300 guests attended the presentation of awards Luncheon at the Royal Garden Hotel, Kensington.

Pauline Gordon – Marketing Executive at Linden Foods said; “The FMT awards are a celebration of creativity, innovation and excellence within the British food industry and we are delighted to be able to pick up this Best New Product Development award. We thoroughly believe the M&S Pork Saltimbocca to be truly a special product that boasts innovation, attention to detail, married with succulent tastes and flavours.”

“Linden work very hard to create exciting new products for our customers, we have a very experienced and forward-thinking NPD team and most importantly we believe in a collaborating relationship with our partners, helping us to deliver the best products.” Concluded Pauline.

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Love is in the… ground? Mash Direct has found a more romantic use for their vegetables this Valentine’s Day by sending out personalised messages on potatoes.

The family run farm based in Comber, Northern Ireland, are so proud of their award-winning potatoes they have hand-picked a selection of spuds from their fields to be sent out to people as a Valentine’s gift.

Helping those of us who struggle to find a Valentine’s gift, Mash Direct have asked for their consumers to send in their own personal messages to send to their Valentine. Mash Direct will select their top ten favourite messages, hand-write these onto potatoes and send them in a gift box to the consumers valentine along with a Mash Direct hamper and bottle of bubbly.

Clare Forster, Head of Marketing, comments “Our vegetables have won a lot of awards recently and so we wanted to share the love that we have for our products with the rest of the world. At Mash Direct we specialise in making convenient and delicious vegetable side dishes. They are ready in just a few minutes which means that our customers can spend more time with their loved one this Valentine’s Day.”.

The gift box also contains a poem entitled, #SpudLove, the companies own humorous homage to romantic literature highlighting the convenience and nutritional benefits of using their products as part of a Valentine’s meal.

You can enter Mash Direct’s Valentine’s competition #SpudLove by visiting the companies Facebook, Twitter and Instagram pages @mashdirect.

The first Year of Food and Drink Awards saw Derry City & Strabane District Council chosen by a panel of expert judges as Destination Delicious, Northern Ireland’s leading food destination.

Derry City & Strabane District Council furthermore, won the award for the Best Food Event or Festival for its hugely successful LegenDerry Festival organised by the regional council as part of a programme of initiatives for tourism and food and drink. Highly commended were the Speciality Food Fair, Moira, organised by Lisburn and Castlereagh City Council, and Comber Earlies Food Festival, an initiative by Ards and North Down Borough Council.

Derry’s Foodovation Centre, established by North West Regional College, was chosen as winner of the Growing for the Future Award for its work to promote and assist innovation among food and drink companies in the North West. The Journey to Market Programme from Causeway Coast and Glens Council was highly commended in this category.

Food Heartland, an initiative by Armagh, Banbridge and Craigavon Council, gained two awards – the Roots to Market Award and the Best Food Story Award. Highly commended were Cavanagh Free Range Eggs, Newtownbutler, Co. Fermanagh and Causeway Coast and Glens for its Food Network.

Highly commended in the Best Food Story category were The Walled Garden Helen’s Bay and Belfast Metropolitan College, who recently celebrated 110 years of training in Belfast and the launch of the Linen Lounge, Yard and Scullery restaurants and their ‘Made at the Met’ Cookbook.

The Best NI Local Market was won by Comber Farmers’ Market, which is organised by Comber Regeneration.

The Eel-Eat promotion of Lough Neagh eels, created and implemented by the Lough Neagh Partnership, gained the Best Marketing Initiative, while Tayto Taste of Home, Tandragee, Co. Armagh and Launching the Spar Enjoy Local Meat Range were highly commended.

 

Sperrin Cycle Far and Wild, a popular cycling tour of the Sperrins, which visits Dart Mountain Cheese among others, won the Best NI Tours and Trails. The award recognised the rapid growth of tourism tours across Northern Ireland – there are now 17 such tours operating here. Highly commended were Belfast Food Tour, Taste and Tour Ltd and Catch and Sea, a collaboration with The Causeway Lass and Babushka, The Harbour Portrush and Causeway Coast Foodie Tours

Mash Direct, the Comber-based producer of convenience foods, clinched the Food Innovation Award for its Crispy Vegetable Bakes product. Highly commended were The Kitchen from the Henderson Group, Newtownabbey, and Smoked Lough Neagh Eel from Lough Neagh Fishermen’s Co-operative.

The Year of Food and Drink Awards were organised by the Belfast Telegraph in association with Tourism NI, Food NI and Invest NI. Other category sponsors were the Department for Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs, Moy Park, Spar NI and Sodexo.

The awards were held to celebrate the achievements of Northern Ireland’s first ever Year of Food and Drink and to mark the huge contribution of tourism and food and drink to the local economy.

The judges were Charles Campion, MasterChef judge, top Irish food writer Georgina Campbell, Professor Una McMahon Brown, Ulster University, and Belfast Telegraph, Food Writer, Joris Minne Michele Shirlow, Food NI chief executive, commenting on the awards, said: “I congratulate all the award winning, those who were highly commended as well as those shortlisted. The awards showcased the dynamism and innovation now underpinning the key tourism and food and drink industries here.

“Both industries, which are crucially important to the local economy and especially in predominantly rural communities, are poised for even faster growth in the year ahead and indeed well into the future. With 90 entries, the awards emphasise the close connection between Food and Tourism and the impressive collaboration and cooperation between all the stakeholders in both. Food NI will continue to play its part in initiatives to build on this hugely important development.”

Demanding diners in some of Tokyo’s 5,000 exotic sushi bars could soon be enjoying one of Japan’s prized herbs that’s now being grown near Portadown!

Wasabi plants, said to the world’s most expensive and difficult to cultivate – even in Japan – are now sprouting in a huge polytunnel near Laurelvale in Co. Armagh.

Hoping to harvest the benefits of a growing demand from top chefs in Japan and other parts of Asia for wasabi is part-time farmer Dr. Sean Kitson. His day job is in biomedical science in one of Northern Ireland’s biggest pharmaceutical firms. Wasabi is served with sushi either as leaves or grated into a bright green paste.

Dr. Kitson says wasabi is in huge demand because traditional growers in Japan are scaling back in production because of high labour costs involved in the cultivation and processing of the herb that’s usually added to sushi to provide a hot ‘kick”. “Much of the wasabi used today is not produced from the plant but from horseradish. It’s part of the Brassica family, which also consists of horseradish mustard and cabbage.

“Even in Japan, the demand for real wasabi is so high that chefs often use a horseradish paste instead, with little, if any, real wasabi mixed in. What we are nurturing at Laurelvale is genuine wasabi that will appeal to Japan’s discerning sushi chefs,” he adds.

A top local chef is already interested in being able to create original dishes of local ingredients including wasabi from Armagh.

The highly prized herb is generally to be found in the mountain streams of Shizuoka Prefecture, where it grows best with its roots in sparkling, nutrient-rich, running water from the snow-shrouded slopes of the towering Mount Fuji, Japan’s sacred mountain.

Kitson, a father of two, has virtually recreated the exacting conditions in Japan using pioneering hydroponics technology that enables plants to be grown in water. He’s also become the first grower in Europe to germinate wasabi from seeds.

Why did he decide to start growing such a challenging herb in Northern Ireland? “I started growing wasabi to help my son, Zac, fight a serious medical condition,” he says. “I used my knowledge of biomedical technology to research a number of plants and found that wasabi had anti-inflammatory properties for joints and muscles.

“It’s a potent plant that has also been shown to help increase protection against bacterial infections in the body and mouth. Some research suggests the plant can be used to fight cancer and also aid heart health. Wasabi, furthermore, is rich in antioxidants that help to boost the immune system and can aid in removing harmful toxins from the body,” Dr. Kitson explains.

Wasabi cultivation stretches back to the ancient Japanese who were enjoying the spicy plant around 14,000 BC with their fish and seafood.

He’s found the soil in Armagh, Northern Ireland’s ‘Orchard County”, ideal for the for the hundreds of plants he imported last year. The first full-scale harvest of Northern Ireland’s most unusual herb is due next year. “This may seem a long time, but it does take two years to grow top quality wasabi rhizomes, as the stem is known to botanists. The good news, however, is that leaves and stems will be for sale later this year.”

To develop the crop’s potential, he set up Wasabi Crop, a small firm, last year. It’s the only commercial grower of wasabi in Ireland and one of a handful outside Japan.

“The rhizome is the most valuable part of the plant and is used to produce freshly grated wasabi paste that Japanese chefs love. After much research into cultivating wasabi, we have mastered germination and the plants are growing fast. Our wasabi is authentic. There’s a lot of fake wasabi on the market at the moment,” he adds.

Freshly grated wasabi, he continues, can be added to a variety of recipes and other food and drink including ice cream and spirits such as vodka. It has a pungent and hot taste that’s said to be very different from chilli. The wasabi ‘kick’ is a zingy and refreshingly hot flavour. “Wasabi is both a herb and a medicinal plant that provides health benefits due to its key component of allyl isothiocyanate which releases during the grating process. The isothiocyanates enable wasabi to produce associated antibacterial, antimicrobial and antiparasitic properties.”

He continues that it’s a great source of dietary fibre and vitamin C and a provider of vitamin B6 in addition to the elements of calcium, magnesium, potassium and manganese.

Mash Direct, a specialist in the development, manufacture and marketing of convenience meals and vegetable side dishes, won the Food Innovation Award at a gala event to celebrate Northern Ireland’s first-ever Year of Food and Drink.

The company, which is based on a family farm at Comber in county Down and is a Food NI member, lifted the innovation award for its Crispy Vegetable Bakes at the prestigious event organised by the Belfast Telegraph newspaper in association with Tourism NI, Food NI and Invest Northern Ireland. The innovation award was sponsored by Food NI.

The awards were held for the first time to celebrate the success of the year-long initiative last year to showcase the quality, innovation and flavours of Northern Ireland food and drink and to promote the region as an ideal tourism destination.

Tourism NI chairman Terence Brannigan said Year of Food and Drink had “surpassed all expectations”. The success of the initiative had placed food and drink at the core of Tourism NI’s efforts to promote Northern Ireland as the perfect destination for international visitors.

The Northern Ireland award for Mash Direct’s Crispy Vegetable Bakes follows the Gold Award for Innovation last year at the international SIAL Middle East food exhibition in Abu Dhabi. The Northern Ireland company also won the coveted Food Manufacture Excellence Award last year.

Mash Direct, established by husband and wife team Martin and Tracy Hamilton in 2004, is now among Northern Ireland’s most successful, innovative food and widely respected businesses. It has an impressive track record in new product development and supplies most of the leading supermarkets in the UK and Ireland. In addition, the company has significant export business in the US, Europe and the Middle East.

Tracy Hamilton, Mash Direct commercial director, commenting on the Northern Ireland innovation award, says: “We are delighted to have achieved this recognition from the food and drink and tourism industries in Northern Ireland. It reflects the longstanding commitment of the business to innovation in products, processes and people.”

The company is the market leader in the production of a highly innovative and rapidly developing portfolio of delicious quick-serve potato, vegetable and cabbage products.

An emphasis on provenance and traceability means that the family farm produces the majority of the raw materials with the rest being meticulously sourced throughout the UK and Ireland to produce a range free from artificial additives, preservatives or colourings.

Mash Direct has also won recognition in other major competitions such as the UK Great Taste Awards and the Irish Quality Food and Drink Awards.

Highly commended in the innovation category were Smoked Eel from

The innovation category was among nine awards for a range of initiatives including food tours. Highly commended in this category were: Smoked Lough Neagh Eel and Spar’s The Kitchen Range of Convenience Foods.

The other awards were:

• Best Food Story – Food Heartland Forum, Armagh, Banbridge and Craigavon Borough Council (Sponsored by Invest NI)
• Best NI Food Event or Festival – LegenDerry Food Festival (Sponsored by Dept for Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs)
• Belfast NI Local Market – Combers’ Farmers’ Market (Sponsored by Belfast Telegraph)
• Growing for the Future – Foodovation, Derry (Sponsored by Spar NI)
• Roots to Market – Food Heartland Initiative, Armagh, Banbridge and Craigavon Council (sponsored by Sodexo)
• Best NI Tours and Trails – Sperrin Cycle Far and Wild (Sponsored by Tourism NI)
• Best Marketing Initiative – Eat Eel – Lough Neagh Partnership (Sponsored by Moy Park and Food NI
• Destination Delicious – Derry-Londonderry and North West