My last column celebrated Canada’s exuberant displays of fresh produce and their ability to embrace the product as nature intended. It is therefore perhaps unsurprising that there is another area in the UK foodservice industry I find so disappointing and frustrating, in preventing us from following North America’s more common sense approach - thoughts shared too by our sales director, David Burns.

The sector is beginning to be taken over by overzealous and bureaucratic technical nonsense, and the results of many audits suggest that these reports are being carried out by those that do not understand the notion of fresh produce. I am at pains to point out before continuing that my opinion cited here has nothing to do with our obligation towards food safety, pesticide usage, due diligence, etc, as those are elements of foodservice supply Fresh Direct is totally committed to, with all suppliers BRC or overseas equivalent accredited.

However, the industry is getting engrossed with technical claptrap - every microbiological test on an apple is covered, but where do these tests highlight flavour, taste or their suitability to the season? They can tell you the apple has 15-18 per cent colouration, but you buy an apple to eat it.

We are allowing these groups to scrutinise products that come out of the ground, and picking up fines along the way. With price increase pressures across many categories - including dairy and wheat - the industry has to work together and seek to offer some type of value to the customer, by stripping out pointless costs.

We aim to give the customer the best possible service, yet we are ceding to these technical levies, which our customers effectively end up paying for.

Fines are factored into the cost to serve, and therefore the selling price to the customer - and in essence, they are passed onto the consumer through their menu choice. Technical parameters were intended to drive the consumer in the right direction, but to me they are achieving the exact opposite.

There are two types of industry - foodservice and retail. Frankenstein produce is not right for foodservice. The housewife going into a supermarket has a choice of what to buy, because the decision is based visually on what is on the shelf.

In foodservice you cannot get more personal than picking the product, preparing it and putting it in front of the customer to put in their mouth - we therefore have a responsibility to lead by taste, and not to fret if a cauliflower is 2mm outside of the specification. The consumer does not care about the size of the crown; the industry is het up about size and colouration, but the customer sees produce in its fully prepared state.

Is foodservice slipping into the same vein that retail entered 10 years ago? Growers are now forced to produce a certain type of product, but the focus should be on flavour, taste and sourcing the right products from the right areas. If we can manage these from the UK, terrific, but we should be making no apology if a product is bought in from anywhere else - it should all be about flying the taste flag.

Foodservice should not enter into the same vacuum as retail. The technical bureaucrat has rewritten the retail bible, and whilst of course foodservice has to take products from a safe source, we must concentrate on the fact that most importantly someone is eating the product.

We are a nation ignorant of flavour. When you shop in markets in France, mushrooms still have soil and spores attached to them; you will not find a courgette without its flower, and you will find peppers that are out of shape, yet so deep in colour. In France you look at the produce and feel warm about it because you know it’s going to taste good. In the UK, we are brainwashing the public into thinking if a product is the wrong shape, it’s going to poison them. It is sad that we see this everywhere - on fish counters, in bakeries, on the butcher’s slab. How will we convince the next generation to eat five a day when products taste bland and much the same as the next? Despite Jamie Oliver’s efforts, kids are still visiting the tuck shop rather than the school canteen, and who can blame them whilst produce tastes of polystyrene?

Let’s club together, lift the smokescreen and inject the foodservice sector with a true description of what we deal in every day - fresh produce, from the ground, in season, at its best, in a realistic state. Let’s blow those tastebuds away.

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