Of all the staff events, far and away the most popular are the regular customer product tasting days.
We often bring in our customers’ products, the ones that appear on retailer’s shelves and in their chiller cabinets, so that everyone gets to taste the delights they’ve been involved in creating – whether that’s devising recipes in Product Development or producing the fillings, purees, jams, curds, mincemeat, Utterly Fruity, compotes, confections orany number of other fruit preparations that go into making the best baked goods, desserts and dairy products.
It not only reminds us how fortunate we are to be working in such a great industry, it also means that when we’re making our delicious product-range we can all recall how fantastic they taste in the finished creations.
How many other companies can offer an experience as good as that? It’s little wonder we’re delighted to call ourselves Fruiticians and that we’re ‘passionate about doing beautiful things with fruit.’
As one of our delicious compotes features in their top-selling chilled product, we were invited along to the opening in order that consumers could try the product and meet the people involved in preparing the exceptional food they choose.
We always welcome these types of requests because there are never enough opportunities to talk with the people who, ultimately, can send a vote of confidence, or no confidence, in our work through their buying decisions.
The chilled product in question had been television-advertised and represented one of the retailer’s best-ever-selling desserts.
We fielded a strong team so that we could record consumer comments and reactions. The results just reminded me, once again, how important these events really are.
After several days of successfully trialling the finished dessert, there was one response that really summed up all the others:
Just like every trial there’s a jury and I’m pleased to say that the jury, in this case, was pretty much unanimous in acclaiming the chilled dessert as the best of its type, ever. Nevertheless, it’s great to get that at first hand from the people who give a true vote of confidence by choosing where to spend their own money.
