Fishcake maker Hayley Elston is on the crest of a wave this morning (Wednesday) after millions of viewers watched her net a national supermarket deal on Channel 4’s Aldi’s Next Big Thing – and the business started right here on the Isle of Wight. The Fabulous Catch Company was first created in 2012 to help a group of fishermen on the Isle of Wight sell unwanted brown crab meat, using every edible part to create a zero-waste product. Now the business, which moved to Calshot just across the Solent in 2016, has been catapulted to national status with a life-changing contract with Aldi to stock a new product, The Crabulous Crabcake. An estimated 7million viewers watched the nail-biting finale last night as Hayley was told by show hosts Anita Rani and Chris Bavin that she had beaten hundreds of applicants to secure the deal. Speaking about the win, Hayley has said:
“It’s completely surreal. We’ve known for a little while that we were winners but had to keep it under our hats! “Watching myself on the TV was like experiencing it all over again. Now it’s incredible to know that Crabulous Crabcakes will be sold nationally in Aldi. I’ve had so many messages from friends and well-wishers – I feel like a superstar! “This all started with a dream to make responsibly-sourced, sustainable fish products available to all – and today I’m pinching myself that the dream has come true.”
The Crabulous Crabcake is a new product created especially for Aldi in response to their request for Hayley to scale up her existing crabcakes while retaining flavour and consistency. Judges were delighted with their texture and flavour and chose the Fabulous Catch Company over 5 other finalists to secure an order to supply Aldi with 60,000 units to be rolled out across 960 stores. Explaining the origins of The Fabulous Catch Company, Hayley said:
“One of the fishermen’s biggest areas of waste was brown crab meat. Everyone wants picked white crab meat, but brown crab has much more flavour, so we developed what was the beginnings of our crabcake. “We also made a crab pasty and a crab bisque with the shells, and a white fishcake. We took our products across the water to the farmers markets in Fareham where they were an instant hit. We couldn’t make enough. We moved off the island at the end of 2016 to the New Forest and have grown steadily since – but this takes us into a new league.”
And why did it move to Calshot? Because the ferry companies were so unreliable and costly it was risking the companies future. They had no choice but to move. Well done to all that think we don’t need a fixed link, you’re forcing business to leave the island.
That’s a big shift up in production, 60,000 units all locally caught and apparently sustainable. If I was a crab I would be very afraid as something big is on its way to my lovely habitat.
Probably scaling up by using cheap, minging imported crab from the Indian Ocean rather than the excellent local crab.
So negative
Crab fishing on this scale is not sustainable.