Product Development
There are plenty of Meat Processors and Butchers who make excellent sausages. We love sausages at Westaways, and we recognise that in a competitive market innovation is vital. We never stop thinking how we can add more value to our customers and our community in everything we do.
Product development is not just about making succulent, juicy and tasty sausages. We are passionate about sustainability, and wider impact we as a business can have. For example, we are hopeful on being awarded a three-year research project working with Exeter University to look at the opportunity to use locally grown crops like Oats, Beans and Peas with our recipes to add nutrition and make best use of local produce.
We as manufacturers can make changes that in turn can help our customers make changes. Detractors might say that it will add cost. We would dispute this. Give us a big project and we will use our experience to look it at from every angle to provide a world class solution.
Packaging Development
Having won UK packaging innovation of the year for our certified compostable retail packs we were keen to find a sustainable solution for our food service packs. This coincided with an opportunity with a national food service company that had similar green aspirations to ours.
We already are using uncoated, unbleached card trays made from sustainably sourced wood pulp to pack small retail trays. By doubling the wall thickness of the tray, we were able to make the trays rigid enough to take 3 strings of 6 sausages in a handy 1.2kg pack. Double packing these trays in a brown recycled outer made a very compact pack of 36 sausages. To ensure the pack was fully compostable we used a brown paper tape to seal the box and used the same unique stretch film that we use on our award winning retail packs. This is the first certified compostable (home and industrial) stretch film in the world. Westaways are one of the first companies to use this film. In a compost heap the film is quickly broken down by the enzymes secreted by microbes, leaving no harmful residues or microplastics.
Having designed the tray to fit the sausages, we gained space. A plastic tray needs a flange around the top to enable the tray to be sealed with a top lidding film. Also plastic trays are made by heating plastic and drawing the sheet down onto a form. This means that all plastic trays are shaped and do not have upright walls. The space saving that our card tray provides means we can put an extra 200kg on a pallet (or 3,000 qty sausages).
Not only does this give a 22% better use of pallet space and save on haulage. It means professional caterers can fit our sausages more easily into their chilled storage.
They can also home compost every piece of our packaging.
So we have a win for everyone and we are helping reduce our dependence on plastic.
New recipes, new sausages.
Tastes and applications change the whole time. There are certain things we will not do, like use any artificial flavourings or colourings. But we have over 120 years’ experience, knowledge and skill in producing sausages. We can fill into different casing to give any size of sausage accurate to less than mm or a gram.
We have travelled widely growing our export business and we love looking at recipes from all over the world.
If it is a sausage made from Pork, lets talk!