When you’re pressed for time or simply want a night off cooking and opt instead for a pre-made meal from a shop, have you ever wondered about how it’s created or by whom?

Whether from the deli counter or the freezer, the choice is immense for anyone yet to master the art of home cookery or looking for a quick and easy alternative to all that chopping and stirring.

But whilst some ‘ready meals’ have attracted bad press in recent times, Naomi Morgan is keen to ensure that her customers are able to choose dishes that are both hearty and healthy. As the new product developer at Cumbria food retailer and producer Cranstons, she spends her days in the company’s development kitchen creating and working on recipes and meals that meet customers’ needs for speed and simplicity and can earn their keep commercially on competitive shop shelves.

Naomi explains: “The idea is maybe only five per cent of a new product. A lot of the hard work is making sure the commercials work: how much labour do you need to make a new product, what machinery might you need, is further investment required, is the retail price realistic, how will it be packaged?”

The fact that Cranstons’ product development tracker lists at least 23 elements that need to align before a new line can go into production reflects the high demands the company sets for every new dish that emerges from the development kitchen.

Cranstons has a strong track record of creating award winning products, regularly picking up both Guild of Fine Food Great Taste Gold Awards and Q Guild of Butchers Smithfield Awards for its butchery and delicatessen products.

Explaining why the time was right to recruit a dedicated product developer, General Manager Martin Jones says: “In a very competitive marketplace it is now more important than ever to offer customers a unique product range and to make sure we add new products to meet changing food trends. We want customers to come to us with confidence that they will find delicious, freshly made recipes that you just won’t find in the supermarkets.”

For Naomi, who has always worked in food, it is her dream job, in her dream location.

For five years she ran her own food business – Rutland Cake Company – selling her bakes initially at farmers’ markets and at shows in Leicestershire and beyond. She ran the business from home, whilst bringing up their two young children, and became so successful that she built her own bakery unit with a café on a business park. “It became a bit of a hub and we had all sorts of customers from the business park and also people from BBC dramas that were filmed nearby. I basically fed the film crews,” she explains. It also allowed the company to expand into trade sales supplying other cafes and bespoke cake orders.

It was during a visit to her in-laws, who moved to Keswick ten years ago, that Naomi and her

husband, Owen, a landscape architect who constructs gardens at venues like the NEC in Birmingham and Royal Horticultural Society shows, began to consider moving to Cumbria with Cai, 11, and ten-year-old Freya.

Naomi explains: “My dad is from Darlington and mum is a Geordie, so I’ve always had the north in my blood. When we were on holidays we always used to visit Cranstons Food Hall and stock up on delicious sausages and the best bacon I’ve ever tried.

“I don’t know if it was a mid-life crisis, but after I sold my business we decided we wanted to move here.”

Jane Silburn, head of marketing and retail development at Cranstons, says although the company had a strong history of creating great products, it was time to sharpen the focus. “As the business has expanded, and our specialists have got busier and busier with hands on production, we needed some additional, dedicated resource to give us more momentum,” says Jane. “However, when I wrote the job description for the person we would need, I thought I might be searching for a mythical creature – someone who could create mouth-watering recipes whilst having food technologist skills and who also understood the challenges of both production and food retail.’’

Naomi explains: “I was already slightly stalking the Cranstons recruitment page to be honest so I couldn’t believe it when I saw the job advert. I just thought ‘I’ve got to get this job’ which made me so nervous when I came for the interview.”

With experience in developing recipes for several big ingredient companies as well as her own business, Naomi even had knowledge of in-store display. “I worked with a number of companies on trialling new products to consumers. Edible glitter was one a did when it was a really new thing 18 months ago. It needed to be displayed in a way that people could understand how to use it so I created some recipes for consumers.

“A lot of work goes into how products look. The main thing is that you want customers to be really excited to try something new.”

When Stanley Cranston set up the first Cranstons butchers over a century ago, he was committed to providing the best local produce to customers to whom he delivered meat in the northern Eden Valley from his horse and cart.

Since then the business has expanded in north Cumbria with two traditional high street butchers shops in Penrith and Hexham, and, since the millennium, larger Food Halls which combine Cranstons’ own butchery and delicatessen products with a range of local produce. The first food hall opened in Penrith in 2003 with further Food Halls opening at Orton Grange farm in 2013 and Brampton in 2015.

As the business has evolved, so have customers’ choices. Currently, there is high demand for takeaway lunches, with their fresh salad boxes proving especially popular.

Jane explains: “We are very, very strong on our butchery and traditional side of our deli but at the same time we like to keep on top of food trends and need to be in a position to move fast when trends like veganism and demand for lighter salads come along.

“We try hard as a business to monitor the trends, visiting other food businesses and travelling down to London to see what’s coming through. We then consider our market and see how far we can push things. We want to make sure we evolve and grow and make the amazing food we call see on Instagram available here.”

In this abnormal year, as well as remaining open and responding to demand throughout the coronavirus lockdown, Naomi continued to work hard on creating new lines, some in direct response to the unprecedented circumstances.

“People wanted some luxury at home and, after a while, began to be tired of cooking. We’ve developed a range of meal tubs which will launch in September, giving customers a break from scratch cooking with the comfort of knowing they are created with our own meat and fresh vegetables so people could have a really great quality meal.”

As well as four fresh soups, Naomi has developed a Goan butter chicken dish, Thai-style beef, chicken lasagne and pasta sauces. She is also trialling a new vegetarian sausage roll which combines spinach, feta, fresh dill, mint and bulgur wheat.

Jane says: “Prior to the pandemic we were finding that people were perhaps buying and eating meat less often but when they did they opted for the best quality. Having said that, since March we have seen really strong meat sales with meat out performing all other areas of the business in terms of year on year sales growth.

“We recognise that vegetarian dishes are more popular than ever too and have responded to that. We won’t, however, do a meat substitute because we are opposed to chemically-produced products.”

On the deli side, one of Naomi’s favourites is an Indian spiced sweet potato pie. “It’s packed full of sweet potato, carrots and lots of lovely spices. It’s the one that everyone in the factory wants for their lunch,” she says. Cranstons’ handmade big sausage roll is also a bestseller and their rustic scotch egg with hog roast pork is another winner.

Once Naomi has developed a new line in the company’s development kitchen and it passes its trials, she hands it over to the kitchen team.

Scaling recipes up from small to commercial batches is a science in itself. “Working in bigger quantities leads to issues like evaporation rates, volume and consistency, it’s not just a case of multiplying each ingredient,” she explains.

“Some factories might make thousands of units of maybe only five lines, but we make hundreds of lines in smaller amounts. It’s why people come to Cranstons because they don’t want homogenised, generic products.

“There’s also much more interest now in shopping local but, for me, that also means shopping for quality. I’m a stickler for quality ingredients which isn’t an issue at Cranstons.”

The ranges are refreshed three times a year, in March, September and November, which includes a special selection for Christmas. This year customers can look forward to premium beef wellington made using 21-day aged meat and mushroom duxelles paté and, building on their popular tear and share hog roast sausage roll, a new version with smoked bacon, chestnuts and apple.

New fresh soups for winter include sweet potato and carrot spiced up with chilli and cumin and the seasonal return of Naomi’s own family recipe for lentil and bacon.

She adds: “I am really excited about my new role, working with such a dedicated skilled team and quality local ingredients is every product developer’s dream job. I want our customers to continue to feel great about the products they are buying, and for the kitchen to feel proud creating them.”