Highlights:
- We discussed creating a new signature menu or dish for Glossop!
- Ideas were shared for events and festivals in our town!
- We explained how the Network and Glossop Creates can support you.
At Glossop Creates, we believe that food and drink is one of the most accessible and essential forms of culture, with a real and tangible impact on our lives and health and wellbeing.
We reinitiated the Food and Drink Network with some key goals in mind.
- To find out where our sector needs support, what that might look like.
- To understand where the gaps are in the town’s F&B offer and how we fill them
- To hear new ideas and concepts for the town and work out ways to make them happen as a network.
We held the event on a rainy Monday night this week, at the exceptional Distant Hills, who put on a generous spread of food for us. Some of those who braved the weather were wonderful businesses and creative individuals, representing our town’s most exciting artisans and operators. Harvey Leonards, The Bottle Store, Glossop Wholefoods, Open Kitchen Mcr, The Garden Centre, were some of the locally based businesses present. Additionally we had GRUB and The Talleyrand from Manchester in attendance, who are stellar organisations looking to start exciting new events and businesses in Glossop. We also had F&B consultant Esther Morrison at the event. Her expertise in creating reasons to visit places using artisanal food and drink promotion, projects, and events as the draw, is vital and important to the network.
How the Glossop Creates toolkit can help you:
We discussed how businesses and individuals can make the most of Glossop Creates’ website and social channels as a promotional tool, adding your events to our What’s On, listings to the Community section and ideas, stories and thoughts to our blog. We encourage submissions and ideas for our Things To Do page, so when people search ‘things to do in Glossop’, they are greeted with a page full of curated highlights where you can see the best of the town, through a local lens. Glossop Creates have featured Eating and Drinking in Glossop, Vegan Glossop and are in the process of launching The Glossop Hop pub crawl on our Things to Do page.
We have a weekly slot in the Glossop Chronicle and so encourage our businesses to submit stories and content that we can feature to the town’s audience.
Support:
During the meeting, we made the network aware that Glossop Creates also offers mentoring and support, where we give people access to amazing individuals and professionals who can guide and advise their practice. We talked about our Pairings Artist Residencies, where we pair artists with businesses, issues or landmarks that are integral to Glossop’s identity. We made a commitment in our next round of funding to make a local chef the artist in residence, pairing them with an issue or concept that can develop into an exciting food based project for our town. The network had some ideas around this.
Esther Morrison’s work is about unlocking the potential of places through creating food cultures in our towns. We talked about:
- What a Glossop Pie might look like?
- What are the local ingredients, folklore food stories and what is our town’s culinary heritage?
- Which food do locals remember being cooked for them at home and why is that important?
- Whinberries and Whinberry pie came up a fair bit, as did the usual meat and potato northern dishes.
We’d like to hear from you all about what the town’s food heritage is or could be. Our network is behind the idea of creating new dishes to entice people to the town. All input is welcome, so get in touch at:
hello@glossopcreates.com
New and Existing Events and Festivals:
The network discussed how we can develop and support events and festivals in Glossop. We talked about Glossops’s vegan heritage (which is a consideration for the aforementioned Glossopian dish idea) and how it is widely known as a vegan haven, given the ratio of vegan establishments and offerings to the size of the town. It seemed to be widely accepted among the group that an annual vegan food festival could cement this reputation and entice visitors looking for a different kind of offer to that usually found in a semi-rural location.
We discussed how we might launch a new dish for Glossop at a small festival, for example, if Whinberries were the main or secret/key ingredient, then Distant Hills could do a Whinberry Beer stall, Mettricks a Whinberry Pie stall, Operation Farm would make a Whinberry juice, The Bottle Store could make Whinberry Liquor etc.
So a food related festival could look a few different ways, with a number of different focusses. There’s definitely room for more than one such event in Glossop!
The group also talked about how local food and drink businesses can be better represented at local staple events like bonfire night shows, the Christmas lights Switch On and the Victorian weekend. To this end, we will strive to have members from the Glossop Round Table and Jane Fletcher (who generously runs the Christmas Lights event) present at the next meeting. We encourage those in touch with them in the network to reach out to new key stakeholders and bring them into the network.
These people could also give the group great insight into working with High Peak Borough Council to secure locations and find the right departments to work with to grant access and permissions to hold these large scale public events. We looked at outdoor venues and options for a food festival, such as Glossop North End in the off season, the Cricket Club and the industrial units behind Tesco. Partners like GRUB are a fantastic addition to the network and have years of experience with projects and events of this nature. The network will explore the feasibility of making exciting events happen in our town with GRUB.
As we discussed events and projects with enthusiasm, the importance of something to work towards became clear. We will take steps before the next meeting to have relevant partners around the table to set the wheels in motion, and make what we are talking about ultimately happen. It will take the whole group to drive these projects, seek funding, advocate and sustain these ventures. The first step is to apply for a feasibility study for outdoor events through SPF funding. Local and Grub are currently writing the application and will submit imminently. We will let you all know when we hear more.
Sector Challenges:
As we discussed sector challenges, issues like ethical employment contracts, staffing and finding skilled individuals immediately came to light. Some solutions offered included utilising communication avenues of the network more effectively, through things like a Whatsapp group or Facebook Group for staffing and borrowing equipment, resources and emergency advice or support when needed. The idea being that somebody will be able to pick up an issue and resolve it fast. The group agreed that in order to make Glossop attractive to skilled people and encourage them to come and work here, it was important to try and make Glossop a Living Wage town. It would make a brilliant news story and give the town a platform as being forward thinking, fair, and thinking about sustainability and the wellbeing of employees.
As you can see, there were loads of brilliant ideas and important issues discussed. The next step is feasibility and implementation. With this in mind:
The dates for your diary for the next two network meetings are:
Monday 22nd May 2023
7pm- 8pm
Location: TBC
Monday 24th July 2023
7pm- 8pm
Location: TBC
If you would like to cater for or host this event at your venue then please get in touch. We will pay a small bar tab for first drinks and some catering.
Next time we will:
- At the next event GRUB will attend to discuss more ideas for an event. We would like to further discuss the new dish for Glossop and we hope to secure Luke Payne from the Packhorse Hayfield as our chef of choice to spearhead this project.
- Invite Jane Fletcher and Glossop Round Table and Glossop Rotary into the network and secure their attendance.
- Invite a member of High Peak Borough Council to answer your questions around planning and events.
- We will set up a WhatsApp and Facebook Group for the town’s F&B to contact each other fast, handing over the administration of this to the group, as this isn’t something that Glossop Creates should control ultimately.
In the interim, if you have any ideas, thoughts or questions about what you’ve just read, then please get in touch. See you very soon!
Glossop Creates Team
