Craig Thomas of Martin Thomas Butchers in Pattingham Staffordshire was the UK’s only competitor in the DFV (German Meat Association) product competition at IFFA 2019 but returned home triumphant with multiple medals.
His winning products were a traditional black pudding, which achieved a gold medal, a black pudding with apricot that won a silver and he gained a bronze medal for his black pudding with beer - which also won a gold award in the 2016 competition.
Craig originally entered IFFA in 2016 obtaining a gold for his black pudding with beer and a bronze for their traditional black pudding, made to Craig’s recipe he created in 1997 when their previous supplier was shutting down.
Craig worked with AW Smith & sons (now part of Dalziel group) to create his own bespoke blend of black pudding.Since then they have won regional awards from the Wolverhampton and district butchers association(Craig’s home association) in 1998 & 2010, other major awards including first and second at the Midlands prime stock black pudding competition again with the same products. There have been many other golds at UK competitions including Meatup and NFMFT competitions.
Years later, after continually picking up high scores at evaluations, the CYBC (Yorkshire butchers) openedits 2015 competition to anyone in the country. Unable to attend in person Craig shipped a coupleof entries up to the event and received a phone call on the Monday to say he had won with his black puddingwith beer and became the first non-Yorkshire winner.
This spurned him to take the same winning product to IFFA in 2016 where again the same products took apair of medals. Criag said: "Not only was the business the only UK and NI entrant but to obtain a gold you need all thejudges to agree there are to be no deductions to be made to the product.
When the UK had not left Europe in March this year the DFV approved Craig's entry and he took the decision to submit all of his products to DFV scrutiny.
When the results were posted even he Craig said he was really shocked to have again picked up a medal with each entry, which even the DFV organisers say is not easy over multiple IFFA events.
Craig is the 6th generation in the family business which can be traced back to the mid 1800s. Since going intothe shop full time Craig has taken over most of the production and in the last couple of years has workedwith a major Japanese labeling company to completely re-design a custom labeling system to aid butcherswith HACCP, packing and traceability.
His rise in the trade has been fast as since taking over as secretary of the Wolverhampton butchers association a couple of years ago and he has since been elected to serve onthe executive of the National Craft Butchers. He has worked on FSA white papers for numerous topics includingthe allergen and vacuum standard and has been awarded as a Member of the Institute of Meat.
This story was originally published on a previous version of the Meat Management website and so there may be some missing images and formatting issues.
