New Kent Food and Drink Product of the Year Winner: Curd & Cure's The Rescue Range Broccoli & Stilton Soup

Exceptional food and drink is never far away!

Established in 1988, Curd & Cure is an independent food wholesale company based in Kent. Specialising in cheeses and cooked and cured meats, complemented by an extensive selection of artisan and speciality ambient, chilled and frozen products, Curd & Cure supplies to both retail & foodservice nationwide.

We believe that retailers and foodservice businesses should be able to work with their local producers and artisans with ease. We provide a wholesale consolidation service to connect suppliers with customers and deliver their products efficiently. We use our resources to connect local businesses and create partnerships to build value for the local community and economy.

At Curd & Cure we recognise the impact that our business has on our shared environment. We always look to consider people and the planet in our decision-making and continue to embed sustainability into our business model. With the increasing size of our operations, it is essential that we are constantly looking for ways to improve our processes to become more efficient.

As a food wholesaler, we know that much responsibility lies with us to ensure that our impact on the environment is as minimal as possible. Our experienced team are efficient in stock control and management to ensure that we minimise our waste. This can be tricky in wholesale, ensuring that we have enough stock to fulfil orders for customers while ensuring that we do not end up with a surplus. We have implemented our own food waste hierarchy, which ensures that we divert as much edible food as possible before it goes to waste. We developed The Rescue Range to actively fight the food waste and have partnered with Too Good To Go, an app that connects us directly to the consumer. Our team make up magic bags with a lucky dip of surplus stock which are collected by customers. We have built partnerships with local charities including with our local council and UK Harvest, who are on a mission to eliminate hunger and reduce food waste through redistributing our surplus and provide cookery classes on how to create nourishing meals.

The Rescue Range is hand-made in small batches in a kitchen just a stone’s throw from our office. Long Clawson Stilton is one of our best-selling products, so any surplus we divert and use in our broccoli & stilton soup. We minimise any waste by using the entire broccoli, including the stalk, and also collaborate with Provenance Potatoes and rescue their wonky potatoes. With 38% of ingredients within each pot upcycled, we have added value by redirecting them back into the human food chain - we can all fight food waste with every mouthful.

Since we launched The Rescue Range broccoli & stilton Soup as part of the first-ever Food Waste Action Week in 2021, we have launched two more soups to the range. The pea & honey roast ham soup uses offcuts of ham from our production unit where we cut down whole hams into retail packs. The trimmings and offcuts are used to make a rich stock and for the chunks in the soup. The third is our rich mac & cheese, using farmhouse cheddar and rescuing wonky potatoes.