Tiffin Kay BVBA

Company Description

Brussels 21.01.2013 Dear Richard, A short introduction Before the industrial revolution people cooked their own food. By the late sixties the tv dinner and convenience foods like pot noodles Tiffin Kay BVBAre a standard fixture in most supermarkets. The combination of freezer and microwave allowed the TV meal to flourish through to the eighties when the health concerns of a nation, rapidly becoming addicted to excessive salt and fats, forced many manufacturers to snap back to reality. TV meals started to clean up their act. This process has gradually continued through to today where the ready-to-heat meal still features largely on most shopping lists but the choices are practically unlimited, ranging from the mass produced reclaimed meatballs in spaghetti, retailing for under 2 pounds through to luxury Quails thighs with Truffled Vitelotte Mash at ten times that. From Weight Watcher’s reduced calorie, vegetarian and Halal, to gluten, lactose, nut and even salt free, whatever restriction you want it is probably being manufactured. Theoretically it would be easy to argue that there is nothing new that can still pique the commercial imagination in a market as saturated as that. Yet, as long as buyers exist there will be sellers determined to get them to prefer their particular product or brand. Like us! The Tiffin Kay ethic At Tiffin Kay we do not work in a factory. We have a kitchen, where fresh vegetables, starches and pulses, as well as quality fish and meats are transformed by hand, , into quality dishes rivalling and indeed surpassing what a competent housewife could make at home. Although we have close to 1.500m2 of work floor our dishes are produced in small batches of maximum 120 portions to minimise the detrimental changes inherent in scaling up. Our work tools consist of stoves, pots, kettles pans and ovens with our combi-steam ovens the only modern tool our grandmothers would not have had. We use fresh ingredients wherever possible and frozen if and when necessary. We use no artificial additives at all of any kind (although some of the components we use, like Alpro soya milk, and Marcus’ veal sausages, might). Each component is carefully cooked to the exact point at which, after 4 minutes in an 800w microwave, it will be perfectly cooked. What K-cuisine delivers, is hand-made restaurant quality cooked food, hand packed and sealed (MAP) in carefully separated containers designed to allow the consumer to heat and plate looking and tastinglike food just cooked from fresh. K-cuisine dishes, soups, salads and desserts have kosher certification. Many dishes are vegetarian as well. Most of our dishes are suitable for Halal (a few contain vinegar or wine which could be adapted if necessary) but not yet certified. Our soups (except for the chicken soup range) are all vegetarian or vegan. We are exploring the possibilities of a bio line or even switching to bio altogether in the future if we see that is what the market demands. Our packaging for the moment is designed for the catering on the fly kosher market and thus not designed to attract the consumer from the supermarket shelves. That can of course be addressed as and when necessary. The market for this product in kosher is already out there. The same impetus that has caused the microwave-meal compartment in all supermarkets to double or treble in the last few years, will make the kosher housewife embrace such a product. There is a also a large community of kosher consumers outside of the heavily concentrated ‘Jewish’ areas who will embrace a product that is kosher and healthy. With kosher/Israeli sections in most superstores today the demographic of those who want to or would by kosher is known to you. They are supplemented by many thousands of families who travel round the country and rely on what is available at the local superstore. We firmly believe that our old-fashioned, traditional methods of cooking combined with the quality ingredients we use and the recipes we have developed, in combination with our passion for quality and the stringency of our Rabbinical supervision (no single ingredient enters the factory without it and its manufacturer having been passed by the Rabbinate) make ours a product that might need its kosher badge as a stepping stone into the market and to justify its steeper price but with the right exposure could become a household name in a few years. The products currently available: Ready-to-heat Fresh – 3 weeks fridge life – 450gr heat for 4 minutes in the microwave. Frozen (defrost and heat) 18 day shelf life in the refrigerator after defrosting. Fresh vegetarian gourmet soups – heat in microwave or pot. Catering supplies in bulk.