ARTISAN FOOD CLUB - Key Persons
Aylie's career started 20 years ago working with Fresh and Wild across operations and purchasing. In her time, Aylie has worked with many food businesses, from small start-ups to global companies. Most recently Aylie has worked with the buyers across grocery, meat, seafood, speciality cheese & charcuterie for Whole Foods Market. Aylie has helped many food and drink producers establish themselves in the sector and has a real passion and understanding of the challenges facing artisan as they their concept into an established retail brand.
"There is so much Marcus and I can do with our combined knowledge and experience. We want to create a foundation on which artisan food producers can grow, including our Code of Conduct; a benchmark for suppliers to follow when they join the Artisan Food Club." Aylie Cooke.
Catherine qualified as an accountant in 1993 and has almost 30 years experience working across a broad variety of industry sectors, advising, and assisting clients with their financial reporting. More recently Catherine has focused on the food sector, specifically working with small food companies responsible for the improvement and redesign of their financial controls. After an injury, Catherine had to change her diet and discovered that not all the porridges were sugar free, so she set up her own sugar free porridge company called the ‘Magic Porridge Pot'. This has given her a direct understanding of artisanal food world as well as the rules and regulations within the industry.
"The Artisan food Club takes on my guidance and is open to new ideas, and Marcus is really enthusiastic to work with, which is lovely". Catherine Peters.
Marcus grew up in North Wales and left school at 16 to work on sheep and cattle farms in Australia. Marcus returned to the UK in 1988 to study Agricultural Management before entering sales for the dairy-farming sector. Marcus's passion was always food based and in 2008, further to 10 years at Patchwork Pates, the family business, he started his own BBQ sauce range. Armed with this knowledge and personal experiences of the challenges that food producers face, Marcus created ‘Carter Food House' a national wholesaler to butchers and fish shops and the ‘Virtual Farmers Market', an online sales platform for artisan producers.
"My passion to help independent food companies have a voice has been the driving force behind many of my ventures and is my primary aim with The Artisan Food Club". Marcus Carter
Olly started his career as a film director in 1995, making dance hip hop movies for the Arts Council of England. Olly then quickly moved over to TV as a producer working in the gaming sector at the birth of live internet streaming and interactive television. Always an artist, innovator and a cook, Olly took the plunge in 2013, and set up his own artisan food company, Ollybars, a vegan gluten free energy bar. What started out as a bit of hobby soon turned into a national UK brand, manufacturing from his bakery in Hoxton and exporting to ten different countries.