Food glorious food: we eat it; we cook it; we devour recipes. We like finding new restaurants. But how many of us realise that the UK food industry is now a vital element in the profile of Britain’s manufacturing industry?

While Rotherham continues to crank out the world’s finest engineering steel (thanks to a £90m investment by Corus there last year), South Yorkshire is also writing a new chapter in its industrial heritage by employing a total of 37,000 people in the food industry.

Across the region 200,000 are employed in the food business, which amounts to 10 per cent of the Yorkshire and Humber economy. Every day, lorries loaded with Hovis loaves and KP nuts leave Rotherham industrial estates.

The town centre’s 800-year-old market hosts some of the best fruit and vegetable traders in the North. Rotherham. Businessman Tony Webb, who boasts he started life as a barrow boy in Rotherham market, now heads one of Europe’s biggest fruit wholesale operations. He has been awarded top French honours because of the increase in business his firm alone has generated between Britain and France.

All of this is helped by the funds flowing in from Europe under Objective 1 and other regional assistance. When in London I am astonished at the profusion of food outlets of every sort, offering fresh food produce across the range, from Britain’s greatest contribution to fast food – the sandwich – to every variety of ethnic food, from the grilled meats of Argentina to the spices of Zanzibar.
There are major opportunities for the Asian population of Rotherham, whose Kashmiri home cooking is scrumptious, to explore ways of turning this into food products that can be sold all over Britain and exported to the 400m customers whom we can trade with freely thanks to the existence of the European Union.

To achieve this Rotherham and the region need to harness the manufacturing and high-technology know-how to meet the challenge of producing high-quality, high value-added food products. Although much of what we may buy is, and will continue to be, imported, we still have to eat three times a day. If in the past British cuisine was soggy and without taste, today’s rediscovery of the best English food products, and the new ethnic cuisines produced by Britain’s innovative Muslim chefs, shows that food manufacturing can have a very bright future indeed.

An important element in this is the ‘Buy Local Partnerships’, to encourage local producers to link up with retail outlets. In this we can learn from our European friends. Now when I go to a big French supermarket I see plenty of fruit and vegetables that are produced in the immediate locality and strongly marketed as such, with prominent displays in the giant French supermarket chains. It’s up to Tescos, Morrisons, Asda and Sainsburys, Marks & Spencers et al to do likewise.
We have to see the food industry in the round and, as Rotherham and the region re-invents its economic profile, there must be a strong place for food manufacturing in it.