Chefs swap fine dining for fermentation

Glyn Gordon enjoyed a successful career as a head chef in fine dining venues throughout London for 14 years, including taking on the role of head pastry chef at London’s famous 5-star hotel Claridges, before co-founding the startup Eaten Alive in 2016.

“I grew up vegetarian. My mum was very into nutrition, healthy food and having home cooked meals. She would make us brown bread from scratch and we never ate processed foods.​

“We were also regularly hosting large dinner parties so entertaining and cooking for others was a big part of my life.”​

Gordon explains how he developed a love of fermented foods.

“I would regularly do my own foraging for my dishes and when you’ve gathered the ingredients yourself you really want to get the best out of them - naturally.​

“You’d be amazed the amount of ingredients that really aren’t tasty until they have gone through fermentation to make them delicious.​

“The idea of channelling a life-force into food and leaving it to do its job and create a delicious product is a very satisfying thing to do.​

“What I am actually doing is very simple but what goes on inside the food during fermentation is incredibly complicated and we can’t really take control over it, which is exciting, but a difficult process to run and scale up a business around.”​

Loving the natural process of fermentation, he would regularly include fermented elements within his dishes but it wasn’t until he met fellow chef Patrick Bingley during a ‘disco bistro’ opening at St Paul’s that he let his interest in this cuisine fizz.

They discussed their mutual love of fermented food and brewed the idea of opening a restaurant focused on these foods but when they realised their network of keen customers they realised they needed to make their a manufacturing and supplying business.

“We started making the products for friends’ restaurants and then the requests were coming in more and more until 3.5 years later and we’re up to our necks in kimchi!”​

The founders, who now look after a team of 10 staff, have developed a range of kimchi sauerkraut and fermented chilli sauces which they sell direct to consumers as well as supply to restaurants.

Whilst their kimchi ferments in two week, their sauerkraut can take up to six, and the chillies for their sauces need 4-6 months.

Gordon admits this slow process is a challenge when it comes to scalability.

“When we first started there was two of us filling crates with veg at the local market to make ten 20 litre buckets.​

“Now we take a lorry and make a couple of trips and process 2,000 kilos of cabbage on a busy day.​

“Trying to scale up this sort of business is stressful to be honest. If Tesco were to call us tomorrow and say we want to stock your product in all our stores it would take us about a year to be able build up enough stock to do that.”​

Whilst many elements of production are made harder as demand increases, Gordon says he looks forward to when they have enough orders to deal directly with the produce growers.

“I like to see and touch the veg we are going to use and so I try and get down to the market at 5am two or three times a week for the best quality veg but there are some ingredients we have to get through a wholesalers.”​

Although they didn’t originally create their business with health benefits in mind as a selling point of the products, Gordon says he is enjoying this added bonus personally.

“I used to get heartburn all the time which I don’t now, and I definitely get less colds since I’ve been eating it every day.​

“But I think it’s important not to sell the products as some sort of ‘cure all’ for health as these products can only provide health benefits when eaten as part of a healthy and balanced diet.”​