Charlie Bigham – Food for Thought
The story of the ubiquitous food brand Charlie Bigham began in 1994. After quitting his management consultancy job at 28, Bigham bought a campervan with his then-girlfriend to embrace the nomadic lifestyle. The pair drove through Europe, into Turkey and down through Syria, Jordan and Iran. Along the way, they became inspired by the smells, flavours, and colours of the dry lands they sojourned.
But it was one hot-and-clammy night in particular, while they crossed the border from Iran to Pakistan, that an insomnia-stricken Bigham began to grow the kernel of an idea for a food business. He had spotted a gap in the market that took the hassle out of cooking from scratch and combined flavoursome food with effortless ease.
By 1996, the Charlie Bigham brand was created after he perfected three dishes in his home kitchen — Caribbean lamb, Cajun chicken with salsa and salmon with dill sauce. Bigham went door-knocking around all the posh delis in London and the big department stores like Selfridge’s and struck luck.
Over 25 years later and Bigham sells over 50 meals that line the aisles of most supermarket stores. Whether it’s his Great Taste-winning fish pie with cod, salmon and haddock and a traditional parsley sauce, moussaka with slow-cooked lamb ragù with aubergines and béchamel sauce or sticky toffee pudding, Bigham’s line of meals are instantly recognisable and cater for even the pickiest of palates.
“We dabbled over the years in lots of different directions for what our recipes would look like,” says Bigham. “I initially thought, I’m going to come up with these amazingly elaborate recipes and persuade people how brilliant they are, but that’s quite a tough thing to do. I remember, one of my favourite recipes was a lamb dish with a spicy fig sauce. I thought it was delicious but only around ten people bought it!”
“At the end of the day, because we live such busy lives, we are not always open to trying new things. You go to a restaurant to be challenged, and for the chef to take your tastebuds to a new place. But when you’re wandering through a shop, you are going to want something you know and like,” he says.
It’s fair to say Charlie Bigham’s meals are indeed a homage to traditional fare. While we tend to associate “traditional British dishes” with bangers and mash, toad in the hole, fish and chips or cottage pie, Bigham takes these staples — such as his slow-cooked beef bourguignon with potato dauphinoise, steak and ale pies, cottage pie with red wine and thyme — and adds a side of panache. But these meals, as Bigham fervently stresses, are not “posh ready meals,” they are instead, “prepared meals”.
“We celebrate being obsessive about food,” says Bigham. “If we put parsley into our fish pie, we really care about that parsley, visit the farmer who grows it and see how we could improve it, and get it to our kitchens as quickly as possible.”
Charlie Bigham operates out of two sustainably-focused kitchens; McNicol Drive in North London, which is home to some of their newer dishes like their Sweet & Sour Chicken and Ham & Leek pie and also one in Dulcote, Wells in Somerset, where they have made their Fish Pie and Chicken Tikka Masala, the best-selling dishes. “We’ve always got a few ideas bubbling away in the background for more recipes,” says Bigham. “It’s obviously fun to experiment with new food but we have to be a bit self-controlled and so spend most of our time improving our recipes rather than coming up with new ones.”
Bigham’s brand was already growing year on year but unsurprisingly, he saw annual sales rocket to £80 million in the pandemic, selling more than 18.2 million dishes in the year to August 2020. “We have been hugely fortunate, we have friends who set up restaurants during the pandemic and had a horrendous two years,” he recalls. “Purely through luck, we were on the right side of the fence, and have grown at twice our normal rate over the past two years.”
Despite the widening of his wallet, the pandemic was still “massively frustrating” for Bigham. “I used to fill my diary with what supplier we could go to and see and suddenly I couldn’t. Like visiting my haddock supplier in Grimsby, who smokes the fish in old chimneys coated in 150-year-old tar. I then suddenly couldn’t see them, and that was hard as it’s amazing to see and chat to these guys and understand their wonderful craft.”
Also core to the Charlie Bigham brand is a focus on community action and sustainable practice. Since becoming a B Corp — a certification that measures a company’s entire social and environmental impact — the brand has employed new targets for water consumption, energy use and carbon drawdown.
“As we’ve been around for a bit and have grown in size, it gives businesses the chance to see how they can be a force for good,” says Bigham. “In the first five years, we were in survival mode but as we grew, we thought about how we could treat people and the environment better. We started buying green electricity and have had a zero-waste approach two decades ago.
“When we introduced our wooden trays, it was a bold and weird thing to do but now they are iconic to our brand and we have avoided sending millions of plastic trays to landfills. Being a B Corp is a great way to affirm who and where we are as a brand,” he says.
On top of maintaining a sustainable ethos, Charlie Bigham also works with the local community. They have worked with City Harvest for almost two decades, donating more than 10,000 meals and surplus ingredients to homeless shelters, afterschool programmes and soup kitchens. They also work with Chefs in Schools, the charity on a mission to improve eating habits and children’s health by sending chefs into schools to train the kitchen teams. As well as the charity HeadsUp, which focuses on the mental health and wellbeing of the local community.
Bigham recently celebrated the brand’s 25th birthday. Over 300 people crowded into one room, from his customers to suppliers, friends and family. It was a particularly humbling moment for Bigham who had seen his business grow from that kernel of an idea he had in the Middle East to the blossoming business it is today. “To see all of them there, all of the people who contributed to the brand and made it survive and grow, it was a true highlight of the journey so far.”
For Charlie Bigham’s last ever supper he decides to warm things up with a daiquiri. “There’s only one way to make a daiquiri,” he assures me, “and that’s with lime, sugar and rum.” For his starter, “half a dozen oysters” which he’d pick from the sea that very morning from his bay, with “tabasco and a shallot dressing.” For his main course, a “moving feast of a Middle-Eastern spread of multiple dishes, from barbecued lamb, baba ghanoush, roasted peppers and so on,” To conclude, he picks a “plum clafoutis”.