Success story: Butchery Bocs
Background
Butchery Bocs is an online nationwide delivery platform that specialises in premium Welsh meat and pantry items from the finest producers based in Wales. The company sources their PGI Welsh beef, lamb and pork from a network of small, family farms who are specialists in pasture raised heritage breeds.
The company is an offshoot of Penygraig Family Butchers in Tonypandy, which is owned by Sam Adams and has been a cornerstone of the Rhondda Valley community for the past 25 years. With independent butchers facing stiff competition from supermarkets, Sam decided to expand their potential customer base by selling online.
As Sam had no previous experience of online retail, the Environmental Health team at Rhondda Cynon Taf Council referred Butchery Bocs to ZERO2FIVE for HACCP food safety management support.
Support from ZERO2FIVE
Initially, Butchery Bocs attended two half day food safety workshops that were held at ZERO2FIVE. These covered the main principles of good manufacturing practices, food safety hazards and an introduction to prerequisites. These are the practices and conditions essential for creating a safe food production environment, including personal hygiene, pest control, cleaning and sanitation.
After attending the workshops, Butchery Bocs received one-to-one mentoring to help them develop a bespoke HACCP food safety plan that was appropriate for the online sale of raw meat. This covered hazard identification and analysis, determining critical control points (steps in the production process that can be controlled to prevent, eliminate, or reduce food safety hazards to an acceptable level) and setting critical limits for them.
Butchery Bocs was also supported with the design and implementation of transit trials using calibrated data loggers to ensure that products remained at a safe temperature whilst travelling through the postal service. Finally, the company was supported with product labelling as they had not previously sold pre-packed products. This covered food information regulations for pre-packed products.
Benefits of the support
As a result of the support, Butchery Bocs successfully became a registered business with their local authority and secured a food hygiene rating of five. They are now able to supply their premium Welsh meat and produce to customers across the UK.
Sam Adams, Owner, Butchery Bocs: “The support from ZERO2FIVE was vital in helping us to expand our business from high street retail to selling online. Without their help it would have been a lot more difficult to get to grips with the food safety requirements for online retail. If you’re thinking of diversifying your business, then I’d recommend getting in touch with ZERO2FIVE for assistance.”
Get in touch with us
If you’d like to find out more about how we can help your business or have any questions about the support we can offer, then please get in touch.
