Hi, it's Siobhan, one of the journalists up at Manx Radio, and welcome to the latest edition of our newscast. Can you introduce yourself as always for me? Tim Johnston, Minister for Enterprise. Tell me a little bit about the event this evening, where are we, what's happening? We're down at the Market Hall, known as Market Hall, a really exciting event. It sort of stems really from a trip we did to London early on the year where we went down to the International Food Exhibition, and we took a group of producers from the island of drinking food producers to that event. Fantastic event and opportunity for them to talk to other retailers and really sell Manx produce, it was a really positive event, over £600,000 of sales from that from out there, which is fantastic. So very much on the same theme, let's do that on Ireland at home, let's get all our fantastic producers together, as many as we can, many of them here tonight. An opportunity for them to talk to supermarkets, to retailers hospitality, so people get an understanding of what they've got, what they're producing, and hopefully from that build relationships and build custom. So there's very much about that business sector then, so that you say that the hospitality industry almost, coming in and trying to link up with local producers, have you had a good response from a lot of different companies and businesses wanting to come down tonight? Yeah, we've got a really good, you know, we've got a good broad range of businesses here, including supermarkets. We've got people from the UK over from supermarkets, so it's great to see some team from Tesco's here, we've got people from the Co-op over, as well as some of our local businesses, and that's really, really positive. I think we've seen, you know, there's definitely a demand for our local produce on Ireland, and so we want to see that grow. Sometimes that's about building relationships, it takes time, and some businesses, they're all in different stages, and where we can help support them with that. The other side, from our point of view, from a DFE, rather than a debt point of view, is we're very much taking on the food export mantle, and that's why, so we took that team to the IFE in London. We have our new food and drink export group, which is set up in the middle of 2023, about 13 businesses involved in that, and that, again, is about growing our food export, but we're looking to grow about 10% a year. That's the plan, so but again, that's our job using the expertise we have in the marketing within DFE, to help resource that and through the business agency, help develop that. Do you think this is kind of one of a number of events we've seen this year that have really shown off our local produce, but obviously we have had the loss this year of the Food and Drink Festival. Do you think that these sorts of events stand in for that, in a way? Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, that DFE's decision to sort of stop doing that event, and there were challenges with it, I think. I think, but it was always the intention of looking to do something different, and this is the sort of event we need to be doing. You know, we had to fund, there was an event down at Cut-A-Town over the weekend, which was really popular, and again, we helped support Red May and that was great. So I think it's an opportunity for us to work with DFE to have different events at different times across the year that maybe suit different businesses in different ways rather than having all in one place. So I think it's got a great opportunity to develop. You know, we've got, say, some fantastic produce, you know, and there's one thing when we went to London and we spoke, went to DFE in the evening, we had our own reception and we invited businesses to that. It was quite clearly we are producing world-class stuff, and that's something to be really proud of. From the department perspective, if businesses make linkups, say, to die with supermarket giants, and you've mentioned Tesco and Copper here, does the department have to do anything following on from that? Do you help facilitate those links help and make sure it's all, you know, easier for our local businesses across? Yeah, absolutely. We're there to offer and help and support and advice. One of the things we know for the major supermarkets that the accreditations they want to see, and obviously when we said Tesco comes to the island, we've helped lots of businesses get them through their sales accreditation, we've put funding and supported that, we'll continue to support businesses that want to do that. Not every business wants to support, go to supermarkets, that's fine, but where they want to, we'll help support that. It's about getting businesses into the place they want to be to develop and we'll certainly do our part in that. Hello, I'm Claire Christian, I'm HK. And you're here tonight in your capacity as political member for Deafer, so we are at a Meet Your Producers event this evening. Do you want to tell me a little bit about what's going on? Yes, so this is a new event and we announced this earlier this year. Basically, it says what it does on the tin, it's Meet The Producers, so we have all of our lovely, amazing local producers here, and we've obviously got the buyers from big companies here to come and see smaller companies to come and see them and make those contacts. Sometimes you've got smaller producers and sometimes you've got bigger producers and they don't get the time to come out and meet the buyers, so this is a really great event and if you can see and obviously you'll see some great pictures that you're going to take and it's just so lively down there and there's a really good feeling and definitely, I can see the producers are extremely happy about it. What do you think, from a Deaf point of view, making those connections with companies' fervor fields like you mentioned, there's supermarket giants here, there's Tesco, there's someone here from the Co-op, etc. Getting the Monks produce maybe boosted across rather than necessarily here, because we all know it's a shop local, but how is that making those connections? Yes, absolutely, and I think that the exporting side of it's really huge, that's why Deafer here as well, because if there are opportunities that can be had, sometimes it's too much of an effort for one smaller producer to do something like that, but pooling our resources together to help them export off the island, certainly something that these opportunities can come out of events like these. This is a slightly different setup than what was the Food and Drink Festival, but do you think that these sorts of events are a good replacement for that, because we didn't have that this year? Well, I think this was a replacement, certainly this is between buyers and producers, so it doesn't replace that interaction of our customer and our fantastic producers. We obviously knew into the department, just three or four months now, so this is something that I'm going to take on as a special project so be it, where I'm looking at working with all the producers to actually get an event or events that really work for them so that they can interact with customers, because it being an ex, everybody knows, a small business owner, I understand it's having that constant contact with your customers, it's really important. Tim Johnston mentioned that this was inspired by going along to an event in London that was a similar thing, producers and things. Would that be something you would look at during the future then, say, in your new role of trying to get these months' producers into different exhibition shows across as well? Absolutely. I know some of our producers do, for example, my screen reads, they do go to these events across in the UK, and again, yes, you're absolutely right, this is what we would like to, again, export getters out there and really, really help these businesses to grow, because that's what's really important. I'm Andre Claynance from Lush Bakes, Difa was the organizer and they were trying to bring a lot of the buying population over to the Isle of Man from across and local buyers, so we decided to come and join, see how it goes, and so far we've had a couple of interactions with people. It's not busy as busy as we thought it would be, but it's been OK. And so, the main thing that Difa and Difa are talking about with this is that it's an opportunity to maybe make links with markets across as well as here. What are you hoping for from this evening? You want that further afield or to sort of boost relationships here on the Isle of Man? I think for us, really, we really settled in the Isle of Man and a lot of the people already know about our products because they sold in the bigger stores around the island. We would like to get into the market across, and then we'll send you some of the biggest stores on the island. I don't know, we'll see what the event brings along, but several, we've had a couple of nice conversations. And do you think the events like this are a good stand-in for the Food and Drink Festival, for example? I'm going to be optimistic and say it could be. I think as years go by, it may grow, but still, the Food and Drink Festival was the ultimate for everybody because it gets your brand out to the population. It gets people who are local buying, where this event really, you know, you're trying to find the buyer from this shop and the buyer from that shop that's maybe going to take your product. So far, really, we've really had a conversation with maybe three people, so it's not been as widespread as you would get the exposure from the Food and Drink Festival. And for Lushbakes, sort of looking into the future there, have you got anything exciting coming up you want to tell us about? Oh, well, we've just established ourselves down in Balthane. We've taken up a new unit in Balthane, and we'll hope to ramp up our production quite a lot more, because we're getting a lot into a lot more stores, a lot more interest, and we're getting a lot more orders in, so we've got to ramp up to meet the demand on the island. Do you want to add anything else you think I've missed? Not really. Lushbakes keeps evolving. We keep adding new product, new exciting stuff. We have our seasonal products that come in every now and then. Most of our stores, like Robinson's, mostly Manx. We have Ken Tundwold Mulzdilly. We have Robert Woodburn Dilly, Killers Down South, and some exciting news for the future coming for Noddery Way, because we're going to be working with them on a couple of exciting projects as well. Perfect. Thank you very much. Thank you. Can you introduce yourself for me? Hi, I'm Ruth from Red Mine and Fire Island. And so we're here today at the Meet Your Producer event down at NOAA's. What made you want to come along today and get involved? It's always really, really good to talk to your buyers face-to-face, let them try samples and get feedback direct so that we can evolve and supply them with what they need most, really. We were sort of just saying off, Mike, that you kind of come to a lot of events around the Isle of Man. Do you get a good reaction when you're out at events like this? Yes. And I mean, people always enjoy trying, especially the hot sources that we do. It's a bit of sport for people, we have quite a good life on the stand, whenever we're out. But we do everything ranging from really mild to really, really hot, and we do the fresh chilies as well, so, you know, there's something for everybody with us. I mean, the sort of primary goal is to sort of let people taste the flavor, the whole flavor of a source, rather than just eat. It's like this then. I mean, do you think it's a good standing, or it could be a good standing in the future for the likes of the Food and Drink Festival? We're definitely seeing a different demographic here, which is brilliant, so a lot of the people here tonight are more weekend workers, so it might be that they don't normally get chance to get out at the weekend, so, you know, it's a great chance for them as well to come and meet us and see what we do and have a nice chat to us and see how we can help each other. Are you saying that? I mean, it is a different market. Are you hoping that you're going to be able to make links with the likes of, you know, there are supermarket giants here, are you hoping we'll be able to see the product across in shells, you know, across the water? For us at the moment, I don't think supermarkets are the right thing, we're a bit on the small slide for that, and there's a bit of a leap to make between supplying locally and then supplying nationally across the UK. One of the things is scale. You have to jump from being sort of a modest producer to quite a big producer to make that bit of water pay in between, it's quite expensive to get small quantities across, so you need to be talking about exporting pallets of produce before you can make it work. We want to keep it local and keep it delicious, so on the island then, is there anything exciting coming up for you guys that you want us to know about? We're off to some Christmas markets now, it's already thinking about Christmas market season, believe it or not. So yeah, so we've got Laxi Christmas market coming up, we've got the Paul Vacherly Christmas market and King Williams Christmas market in our diary, and that's going to take us right up through November, and then, yeah, we're looking to next year already, so we did a first ever Chilly and Barbecue Festival with Cassitan Commissioners down in Cassitan last weekend, and we're definitely looking to repeat that, it was a huge success, so all eyes are on next year for that now. You're one of our producers here that has a great taste award, we had quite a few of them this year, tell me about this. So we've got two great taste awards, we've got one for our original hot sauce, and then we've got a two-star great taste award for our Magaz sausage, which is absolutely phenomenal, there's not many awards handed out, and two-star is, you know, it's quite an achievement, we're really, really pleased with that, so we breed the red-read locton, there is slow-growing native breed to the Isle of Man, and it's a lovely, rich, dark meat, so just getting that up on the international stage is absolutely fantastic. Perfect, thank you very much, can you introduce yourself for me? Hi, I'm Tracer Kelly from Chocki Picky, so we're here at the Meet Your Producers event, why did you want to come and get involved this evening? Well, because the food and drink festival have been cancelled, we were offered the opportunity to come to the meet the producers, obviously with certain products, it'd be no good for me to go into some different establishments, I've got my own shop, but things like the fudge that I brought, the printed on chocolate, and the hot chocolate blend, it's got legs, so it could actually be easily posted out and sent on and personalised as well, and so that was the idea behind the products that I brought today. And are you hoping, I mean, they've mentioned that there are people here from supermarkets across and things like that, are you hoping to expand out into that market or are you basically just hoping to expand your market here on the island first and foremost? Well, it'd be nice either way, I like being local, but obviously the money isn't there locally at the moment, as we all know in hospitality, so if a supermarket was interested in taking it on the product, especially something like the blend, because obviously that will go wherever, then I'd be happy to produce it for them. And you mentioned the food and drink festival there, I've been asking producers here, do you think that this is a good enough substitute for that, do you think that it's a first stepping stone towards a bit bigger, what's your opinion on that? I think it's an offering to soften the blow more than anything else, and anything else going forward, having met Depper a few weeks ago as well, hopefully going forward there'll be more events, larger events, and hopefully they'll build up the reputation that we'd really all had with the Food and Drink Festival, and hopefully with the amount of people, producers that have got the awards this year from the Great Taster Awards from the UK, maybe that'll get a stepping stone into different markets as well. And you mentioned Great Taster, I want to bring that up with you here, because you're an award winner, you've got on the table here, tell me about that, winning that award and what it was for. Yes, I've got the one star award for the Hot Chocolate Blend, and it's for the Dark Hot Chocolate Blend, it's the first time I've applied, so it was quite nerve-racking. But yeah, it just, it's like a pat on the back from somebody else, you know, somebody who's totally detached from it, and it was a nice feeling that we are going the right way with what we're producing. And I know that I've got a very, very good quality product, and it's nice to have that recognition. Perfect, and is there anything else you want to add that you think I've missed at all? No, I just think you need to keep a lookout, and Chocky Picky's got a very good reputation anyway, but the brand, you know, people have come up to me and said, "I had something from your shop," and I keep hoping that Christmas I've got something from your shop, so hopefully the brand itself will develop as well the products that I've produced as well. And do you have anything exciting coming up? Do you have any big plans that you want to tell us about? I'm diversifying, and I am having to adapt to the market, which I've found since I went self-employed in 1996. I've done lots of different businesses, and I'm just diversifying, trying to adapt to the market and what's required, and hopefully, yeah, things should improve, things that's hopefully should improve. Well, I hope it's in, my Christmas stocking as well, so you know what I'm saying? Thank you very much, our problem, thank you. Will, can you introduce yourself for me? So I am Helen from the Alifantalco. Perfect. We're at the meet that you've produced this event this evening. Why did you want to come along and get involved? So it's a great opportunity for networking, really, for meeting local suppliers, or the people that we can potentially do a collaboration with, but also to beat some buyers from across. We're really hoping to get into some outlets in the UK very soon, so yeah, it's a great opportunity for us to be here, so we're really tough. That's interesting, because some suppliers here and producers here don't necessarily want to make that leap over, but you guys are looking to do that then. Yeah, absolutely, yeah, we really want to kind of get some stockis in the UK now, and so it's, yeah, it's perfect for us, but equally, it's nice that we're all here. The Matt Watscale, we are producing, there's potentially shops and things that we aren't on at the moment, on the Alifantalco, so it's a good opportunity to meet those people too. And so these events are slightly different than the sort of Food and Drink Festival, which was more general public coming in, but do you think that going to a lot of events like this is a good standing, so obviously we didn't have that this year, so what's your take on that? Yeah, I think it's important, because it really shows what the Alifantalco is capable of, it's a great showcase for that, and we did an event like this with Business Alifantalco in London in March time, very similar if he was went over, and we got amazing feedback, and I think it's just important to keep the narrative going, that there's great food here, and we need to keep that alive, it's not going to die with the death of the Food and Drink Festival, you know, it's very much alive, and there's events that are happening. The Chilly Festival, for example, on Saturday, just goes to show like what an amazing turnout you have when you have all these amazing producers that can come together, so I think we can really build on that. I know the DF Eman, Mr. Actually mentioned that event in London, so you went along to that, so you had a good reaction when you were there then? Yes, a great reaction, yes, we actually got off as UK listing from people that we met that night, so yeah, so it was really worthwhile doing, and it just gave us the confidence as a small business to take that leap as well, to think that actually, yeah, we can, we can do it, and grow our business accordingly, so yeah, I think it's really important. The last one for you, you've got great taste stars here on the table, so tell me a bit about that, and also, is there anything else exciting coming up for you guys on the horizon soon? So, yeah, we were super jobs, we only entered our salted caramel sauce, just one product into the great taste awards, but we got a two star award, so it was so happy, so again, that's kind of given us confidence to enter them all next year, so yeah, as a point of sale to help sales, it's great, you know, and that is kind of caught by his attention in the UK as well, they really recognise those awards, and it really helps kind of get into those outlets if you've got one, and so yeah, like I say, we've got our first UK listing coming up next month, so that's really exciting for us, and we hope it's not the last. Perfect, anything else you want to add? No, perfect. Thank you for making it to the end of the Manx Radio newscast, you are obviously someone with exquisite taste, may I politely suggest you might want to subscribe to this, and a wide range of Manx Radio podcasts at your favourite podcast provider, so our best bits will magically appear on your smartphone. Thank you. 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