An entrepreneur has come up with a range of seasonings to help people recreate the fried chicken restaurant taste at home after his delivery business was hit by the pandemic.
Hamza Qureshi developed the Bird Dust range of chicken coatings with support from the Food Innovation Centre at the University of Nottingham.
The centre offers free expertise and advice to food and drink manufacturers in Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire.
Hamza, who runs White鈥檚 Gourmet Fried Chicken in Forest Fields, Nottingham, was operating a 鈥渄ark kitchen鈥 business before the latest restrictions 鈥 preparing and selling food exclusively for delivery.
When it took a hit the lockdown he decided to market three different flavours of seasonings direct to consumers via a webshop, Amazon and eBay.
The Bird Dust fried chicken coatings 鈥 in Crunchy, Panko and Reaper styles 鈥 are also now on sale in more than 30 independent retailers across the 海角视频 and Eire.
Hamza, who switched from a career in financial and corporate services in 2018, said: 鈥淲hen the first lockdown kicked in last year, I could see it was going to cause long-term issues and wasn鈥檛 going away any time soon.
鈥淪o, we started exploring ways to mitigate as many of the issues as possible.
鈥淲e had to close the kitchen for a few weeks during the first lockdown when everything had to close but we reopened as a dark kitchen, trying a few different operational models until September last year.
鈥淒uring this time, my initial concerns were being reaffirmed. This issue was going to stick around and there鈥檚 more turbulence ahead.
鈥淚t was important to explore other opportunities and I spent a number of months on market research to understand what was happening.
鈥淐ould we pivot into something that was more practical and sustainable in the long term? How could we switch over with minimal risk?鈥
Hamza came up with a number of potential ideas and approached the Food Innovation Centre for support.
He said: 鈥淲e already had a pretty good starting point as we made most things in house, from scratch, from our sauces to coatings.
鈥淭hey helped us to taper down these propositions which allowed us to get into the market as quickly as possible and secondly to ensure that we were compliant with all the regulations.鈥
The seasonings under the White鈥檚 Gourmet Fried Chicken brand are available in 250g packs. In future, Hamza plans to offer 5kg to 20kg containers for the food service sector.
White鈥檚 Gourmet Fried Chicken has also teamed up with flavoured oils company Borderfields to suggest pairing the Bird Dust coatings with its cold-pressed rapeseed oils, which are produced at Redhill, Nottingham. Hamza said the oil helps the Bird Dust coat oven-baked chicken, as well as fried chicken.
He said: 鈥淥ur fried chicken has been a massive hit over the past two years, while selling from our dark kitchen.
鈥淚t was about time we bagged up the secret and shipped across the 海角视频.
鈥淭he Food Innovation Centre really helped at a critical point to figure out very quickly what鈥檚 possible and ensuring what was possible was compliant from a regulatory standpoint.
鈥淩unning your own business can be challenging during normal times, during Covid that鈥檚 only been amplified.
鈥淭he Food Innovation Centre helped to simplify this complexity and allowed us to see through the mist. A massive thanks to Alice, Richard and the team at the Food Innovation Centre.鈥
The support from the Food Innovation Centre was provided under the three year Driving Research and Innovation project which runs until the end of December 2022.
Part-funded by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) via the D2N2 LEP, the collaboration project provides free specialist innovation support to small and medium-sized businesses.
Richard Worrall, who runs the Food Innovation Centre, said: 鈥淭he food service sector has been hit hugely by restrictions brought in to deal with the Covid pandemic, but many operators have imaginatively and successfully diversified to keep their businesses afloat 鈥 creating new opportunities and new products.
鈥淓xperts at the Food Innovation Centre are on hand to support food and drink manufacturers in Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire to help them grab new opportunities and overcome the challenges that they are facing, and we would urge them to get in touch to see how we could help.
鈥淲e鈥檙e delighted to hear that the Bird Dust developed by White鈥檚 Gourmet Fried Chicken is proving so popular and is now being sold in independent retailers across the 海角视频.鈥
The support provided to White鈥檚 Gourmet Fried Chicken by senior food technologist Alice Jones and the team included advice on compliant labelling, including how to create obligatory nutritional data, and technical input to help the seasoning perform better in oven baking after it was initially designed for frying.
