Producing food in harmony with nature - Abby Allen from Pipers Farm

Working with small-scale family farms to develop a route to market for food produced in harmony with nature has been Pipers Farm’s mission for 35 years. Abby Allen, farms director and co-author of the Sustainable Meat Cookbook, shares her passion for food and farming as she discusses the value of local supply chains and collaboration between rural businesses. 

Her story sheds light on challenges for family businesses, including succession planning and working with external investors, as well as how consumer habits have changed since the pandemic.

Transcript

Mark Greaves:

Today, our guest is Abby Allen, Farms Director of Pipers Farm, which describes itself as a destination for meat that is produced sustainably and in harmony with nature. Abby is also co-author of the Sustainable Meat Cookbook. I'm Mark Greaves from PKF Francis Clark, and I'll be your host. Don't forget to subscribe to this podcast to get updates and notifications on when our latest episodes are available. Hi, Abby. How are you today?

Abby Allen:

Hi, Mark. I'm really well, thank you. And it's lovely to be with you guys today.

Mark Greaves:

Good. I can't quite hear the rain beating on your window where you are at the moment, but it's definitely being one of those seasons so far, hasn't it?

Abby Allen:

It has indeed, and it is beating down. I think we've had maybe two, three dry days since about November, so it's been a long wet winter and spring.

Mark Greaves:

We'll come back to the impact of that change in climate, that more rain around. But let's start for our listeners. Can you describe what Pipers Farm actually does expand on that destination for meat description?

Abby Allen:

Yeah, of course. So Pipers Farm was founded in 1989 by Peter and Henry Gregg, and they really had this vision for producing food in harmony with nature. They had been growing intensive chickens for a high street retailer, and were just shocked with the conditions that they were having to produce chickens. And it was at the same time that Henry fell pregnant with her sons, Will and Ed, and she basically said, "I don't want to be feeding this food to my children," and that was the catalyst to the beginning of Pipers Farm. And then fast forward to these days, we now work with about 50 small-scale farms based up and down the country, predominantly in the southwest, but not entirely in the southwest. And we also sell beautiful artisan cheese and dairy products and seafood that we might chat about a bit later, and lots of other really delicious artisan food.

Mark Greaves:

Okay, I'm already hungry. I'm now regretting that I didn't do breakfast this morning. Never mind. How did you first become involved?

Abby Allen:

So I actually came for a job. I was working with some chefs. I set up my own business called the Chef's Forum where I was working directly with groups of chefs, and a friend of mine said, "There's this job at this farm and I think you'll be perfect for it. I think they need your skills." And I had a look at it and thought, "Oh, this sounds quite interesting." So then I came up to the farm, knocked on the door, came for the interview, didn't really know what to expect. It was one of those very broad job descriptions. And here I am 12 years later, having been on a bit of a roller coaster ride in that 12 years, and it's been a really exciting journey.

Mark Greaves:

So what did you do at the Chef's Forum then?

Abby Allen:

So the business I founded with a friend of mine, we kind of put chefs in touch either with education facilities to get young apprentice chefs into the kitchen to learn how to cook, or we put them in touch with different partners. So if somebody needed a new greengrocer, they needed a new seafood supplier. We were sort of almost like a chef's black book at different contexts, and we hosted events around the southwest to just help broaden the knowledge between chefs and help some of that communication.

Mark Greaves:

That's very foresighted at that stage on the basis of there's an awful lot of that type of thing that's being promoted as the solution to productivity amongst other things at the moment, connecting people about getting the right apprentices in, et cetera. When was that? How long ago was that?

Abby Allen:

Oh, that would've been about 2010 we probably started the business, 2009, 2010. And yeah, it was just an amazing... I was working in advertising, and I just found I was going through these kitchens, talking to these guys, and they would always share their problems with me, and I would say, "Oh, well, I know someone that can sort that out," or "Have you spoken to this person?" And it just became this natural transition to create these events and just get everybody talking and meeting up and communicating.

Mark Greaves:

So how big is your black book now then?

Abby Allen:

I think being in the West Country, it's one of those things. I was talking to somebody the other day, and they mentioned somebody that they knew from Devon and I went, "Yeah, I know that person." It's one of those things. When you're from the southwest, it's quite a tight-knit community, isn't it? Everybody tends to know everyone, and that can be incredibly helpful within business that you can kind of connect people and put people in touch. So that's always been a skill I've probably had over the years.

Mark Greaves:

I think it does hark back to a few other things we've had. There is a resilience in the West Country of trying to solve problems and trying to solve problems using local people. And I think that's a philosophy that underlines an awful lot, and underlines Pipers to a certain extent, about working, cooperation with people, and getting the best out of people.

Abby Allen:

Definitely. I think communication and collaboration, especially when you're in a rural environment, they're so important. Especially when you look at it in the lighter of farming, you have to be able to rely on your neighbours, whether that's sharing knowledge, sharing pieces of equipment. When the weather's really bad, you're there to help each other out. It's all of the work that farmers do when trees come down and they'll come and clear the tree. There is so much of that kind of local collaboration that's really important to keeping these areas functioning.

Mark Greaves:

I think there's that theme there. It's just produced so many good businesses around that actually work more on collaborative rather than competition climes, and just gives a good flavor for stuff. Did they pick the name Pipers Farm? Where did Pipers come from?

Abby Allen:

So it's quite funny. Piper is Peter's nickname, so it's like a family nickname. I don't quite know the origins of it, but he's always been known as Peter Piper. And so in typical Peter and Henry style, they didn't just land on a name. They did a load of research. So Peter went to places like Taunton and Exeter and he stood in the street and he asked lots of people, what do you think of this name, this name, this name? And really it was by gathering all that kind of consumer research in the late '80s and early '90s that there was just something about Pipers that people seem to really enjoy, so Pipers Farm it is.

Mark Greaves:

I'm not going to try and do the Peter Piper picked a... No, I'm just not going to try and get through that one. That's just not going to work. Okay. So in sort of 2017, you and Will took the farm over from Will's parents. How did that transition work? Because those things can be really awkward sometimes.

Abby Allen:

Yeah, and I think to say it was in 2017 is a difficult thing to say. I think it was just a transition over time. Will came back to the business after being at university. I joined the business in 2012, and I think it was just kind of a natural progression where there were elements that Will was very passionate about, and he was very knowledgeable about and strong at. And so he sort of picked up more and more of those elements, and I guess I maybe found my feet with the sort of product and the marketing side and the building the brand and the website and all of that kind of stuff. And then over time, I think it's one of those things, his parents had run this business for 30 years and had done a phenomenal job, and it was about the next generation and where we were going to take the business. So it has definitely been a long transition. It wasn't like today is the day that we are handing over the business.

And they are still very involved, and especially for me on the farming side, I feel like I probably ring Peter about once a day or every other day with a question saying, "What do you think about this?" or "Have you experienced this before?" or... So I think with a family business, there is always that continuation.

Mark Greaves:

There is, but that can be a little awkward. The others we've talked about, sometimes they try and do it slightly more formal just to make sure that the incoming generation do actually take charge at a certain point. Was there just that gradual drift of Will just stepping up and stepping up and you stepping up in roles, or was there a formal retirement or something?

Abby Allen:

I think it was gradual. I think there was definitely that kind of gradual taking on responsibility and a gradual of Peter and Henry feeling like they could take a step back. I think when you founded something that is so complex and involved as Pipers Farm is and you're so passionate about it, you want to make sure that you are not... It's your baby, it's your life's work, it's your image and everything. So I think for them there was definitely us chomping at the bit, wanting to take on more responsibility, wanting to do different things, but there was definitely from them wanting to make sure that we were ready to do it and that we really understood the complexity. So I think perhaps in a different business where maybe there's a simpler supply chain or a slightly simpler model, you could do that, but for us, it definitely needed that kind of gradual transition.

Mark Greaves:

Well, I'll pick up on that simple thing. You talked earlier about working with other producers, other farmers, et cetera. Can you give us a scale of that type of operation? How wide does that net go?

Abby Allen:

Yeah. So when I joined the business in about 2012, we had around 20 farmers that we were working directly with, and then that quite quickly grew to about 25, and then now we are up to about 50 today. That's all on the livestock front, so producing meat for us. There's about 50 farms. But then alongside that you have other farms that there may be breeding livestock where another farm will finish it. There'll be things like the abattoirs, the feed mills, there's so many ancillary businesses that are connected to us. And then we obviously have all of the other artisan products that we buy direct from people. So whether that's lovely artisan cheeses or butters or really beautiful wine maybe from Dartmoor, there's quite a wide network of people that are connected to Pipers Farm.

Mark Greaves:

How do you juggle that? That's an awful lot of different interests of different people, and farming, even in its widest terminology, has always been relatively tough to make a living out. How do you juggle all those different interests?

Abby Allen:

In all honesty, Mark, I have no idea. We just make it happen. I mean Will and I always talk about it's like running three individual businesses. So you have the farming side, which is one business in its own right, working directly with the farms and kind of managing all of that side of things and making sure that the supply chain and the pipeline are all kind of functioning. And then we have the butchery, so the processing side of the business is we are a primary producer. We're taking that raw material in and we're processing it and then packaging it. And then we have what we call the kind of fulfillment side, which is then when we're adding in things like the products from whether it's seafood or cheese or dairy or lovely grains and pulses. And then that's where those boxes then get packed and shipped. So it is almost running three very complex in their own right businesses, and between the two of us and our amazing team, we just about managed to hold onto everything.

Mark Greaves:

Well, I say it's a relatively small team that you've actually got juggling that. I want to pick up on one of those, that seafood one, because Mitch Tonks, we did a previous podcast with him, and he was just talking about the launch of his online side of things. So how does that partnership work with Mitch?

Abby Allen:

Oh, Mitch has just been an amazing person to work with. I've known Mitch for a few years because of working with chefs.

Mark Greaves:

Oh, he's in your black book, is he?

Abby Allen:

Has been in my black book for a number of years and I used to be a bit involved with Dartmouth Food Festival, and so I spent many times planning the festival with him. So yeah, he's been an amazing person, and I would say there are very few people that have the depth of knowledge that Mitch has about seafood, and not just on a local level but a global level. And so when we decided we wanted to add seafood in, it was about a sort of two to three-year project to make sure we really, really understood that supply chain and the sustainability and the ethics and all of those gray areas that you have when you're producing food. And Mitch was such an amazing partner to work with because I think we have such a depth of knowledge about farming, and certainly livestock in this country. It was exactly the same with Mitch. We really felt like we'd found a good partner that really understood the wider scale impact of what food you put on your plate. So yeah, it was a natural partnership.

Mark Greaves:

I'm trying to remember the term. I think it was, I'm bound to mispronounce this, I think it was thalassophile, which is a lover of the sea, which just kind of wrapped around Mitch as the ideal description of him.

Abby Allen:

I think that absolutely sums him up, yeah.

Mark Greaves:

Okay. You did do a fundraise. You raised some funds from a friend's external individual investors to come in to bulk up. What was that for, and what lessons did you learn from that process?

Abby Allen:

So we had been growing the business quite steadily. We've always been much more about quality over quantity, and I think the business had just been naturally finding its feet. I think we were very lucky with the vision that Peter and Henry had 30 years ago. A lot of the mission statements behind the business, so things about permanent pasture and the importance of eating grass-fed meat, antibiotic resistance, supporting small-scale family farms, the climate impacts of the food that we're producing. So many of those questions they had really answered 30 years ago and really, really championed. And here we are at this moment where for much of the 30 years people kind of thought they were a bit mad. It was all about industrializing and scale and they were saying, "No, no, no, we need to slow down. We need to build that community. We need to build the resilience."

And so with that, we had this very strong foundation, and we'd really found this group of customers that was just going, "This answers so many of my problems, whether it's a health problem or a diet problem or they're passionate about animal welfare or traceability." And so we got to a point where almost we had more customers than we could really reach. We were quite tied to our facilities at the farm. Everything started out on the family farm, which is based just outside of Exeter, and we just found, we put up, we had tarps and we had different sort of mobile buildings that we'd put up, old lorry bodies, which we converted into freezers. Any kind of flat space which we're on a hill, so there wasn't a lot of it. We had put a building on to try and cope with the demand that we were seeing.

It felt the right time to say, "Hang on a second. We really feel like this business has got legs. There are so many people that they want to support the mission that we really believe in." Up until that point, we'd used a lot of family money to fund the business. And it was at the point of saying, "Actually, should we reach out to a wider network of people?" And so we looked at bringing in external shareholders.

Mark Greaves:

If other people, other businesses were looking at doing that, what piece of advice or lessons would you give for them as they start to think about that process?

Abby Allen:

Well, that's a great question, Mark. I think probably number one is to start small and start with people that you really trust, and you really know that they believe passionately in what you believe. I think that's really important. So you set sort of clear expectations and boundaries and goals right at the outset, and you are happy with the pace in which you want to grow the business. Yeah. That is very much what we did. We started with one person, he came on board, he was looking to invest in a food business at the time, and he was very, very passionate about farming, about basically the mission that we'd founded Pipers Farm on.

And so it just felt like a great partnership. Again, I'm sure I'll repeat that word a lot, but then a lot of the things we do. Relationships are so important, and especially long-term relationships. With anything working with nature, you can never have a short-term view. So again, finding the right shareholders, I guess we kind of really thought about that and thought, will they be here for the next 5, 10, 15, 20, 25 years? And so that's probably my best piece of advice is start small, and find someone that really believes in your product.

Mark Greaves:

I think underlying that, again, another phrase we've talked about before is taking your time, making sure you are not doing it because you need the money tomorrow. Making sure you are doing it so that you can take time to find the right individual to make sure you can start small and roll forward. Can I just, there's a contrast on a parallel here with the previous guest, Riviera Produce, who do vegetables, brassics, but they do it on a mass scale. They do the collaborative thing with other farms joining in with them, but they have to do it on a mass scale because they end up supplying supermarkets, and therefore that's their channel to market, that's their margin controller. For yourself, how important is controlling the channels to market to you?

Abby Allen:

Oh, hugely important. If we don't get that piece right, that's really, really disastrous for the farmer. So we have to create a business where we are the price maker, not the price taker. And I think that's the challenge with supplying into the supermarkets. You just have no control. If the weather's like this, they don't care. If there's a crisis like we've had with the Ukraine and what's been happening with trying to bring goods into this country, they don't really care. Their business, their doors still have to open, and so they put that pressure right back on the farmer's doorstep. Whereas our business is really about understanding those challenges and trying to find ways to mitigate them. And like you say, kind of slowing things down, having a longer term vision. We're not thinking about having a six-month contract with someone. We've got people that have been farming for Pipers Farm for 20, 25, 30 years, and that's really our intention is to build this really resilient local community where we're sharing the challenges, but we're also sharing the successes.

Mark Greaves:

That's a good description there at that stage. Going through your timer, obviously we had the pandemic about... It feels a bit weird referring to that as a few years ago now. It only feels like yesterday sometimes. So how did the pandemic affect the business and reshape it?

Abby Allen:

I probably can't explain how shocking the pandemic was, running a business. I'm sure anyone that's run their own business through that time can completely understand. I think food was one of those areas that was so dramatically impacted. We obviously had the supermarket just-in-time model that completely collapsed, and so it did require people to connect with their local community to be able to access food. But even for us, we were working around the clock, it was pretty terrifying employing our staff and thinking, well, we need to make sure that they're safe at the same time as being able to deliver food to our customers. But we were literally working around the clock trying to do as much as we could.

But again, because we were limited by this supply chain, we have an absolute commitment to only working with our supply chain. We weren't about to just start buying in food here, there and there anywhere, because that fundamentally isn't what our customers want. They trust us that they know exactly where their food is coming from. We always knew we were going to have this ceiling. We always knew at some point we were going to hit the wall and say, "That's it. We've exhausted our supplies." And so Will was very, very good, very early on, to understand that.

Because we sort of described it a bit like an unplanned Christmas. So it was trying to do a Christmas, because our sales are just so ginormous at that time of year, but with no... We planned for Christmas from about sort of May, really. We're starting to make pigs in blankets and lay down bits of gammon and ribs of beef and all of this stuff. So it was trying to do the thing with absolutely no preparation. So Will was very good about putting in some boundaries. So initially we had to switch off, so we would only supply existing customers.

We had a very long waiting list. There were about three and a half thousand people at that point on the waiting list who wanted to become customers, to access Pipers Farm. We had very long lead times for deliveries, because again, the delivery, that kind of infrastructure really struggled during that moment. And then even things like there was a huge challenge trying to get hold of packaging, because everybody had to suddenly pivot to retailing online. And so things like cardboard, it was very, very hard to get hold of that. So there were so many challenges in trying to operate through that time, but I think, again, we always knew or always had this instinct, that it was going to come to an end at some point, and we needed to be prepared for almost that cliff edge. It's a bit like after you have that huge boom at Christmas, and then it's very, very stark in January and February.

And so we always had this inkling that this was going to happen. And so perhaps unlike other people in the sector who potentially wanted to continue that and thought, "Well, this is going to completely change the game of everyone's going to online shop, they're going to carry this on," we sort of had this gut feeling that people would go back to their normal routine as soon as they could. They would want those experiences, they would want to go out to a restaurant, they would want to go and see their friends. And so that kind of online part was going to dissipate. So we were always very conscious of how much we scaled the business during that moment and how much we kept a bit of the lid on it, and I think that's actually stood us in pretty good stead that we didn't have that huge fall off the cliff once the pandemic ended.

Mark Greaves:

I know on a personal basis, as a butcher we now use, that's about four miles away, but we didn't use before the pandemic, but it was that local source. And we've stuck with that butcher and that butcher has gone from being a fairly quiet butcher in the middle of a village on Dartmoor, to actually now you just get used to the queues, and they've had a transition in that the children have come into a takeover. And you think that's a good thing to come out of that exercise, because you're not sure where that butcher shop and the supply chain behind that butcher shop would be now if there hadn't been a refocus on that. And the thing about food miles that's now really public, everyone thinking more about where their food comes from.

Abby Allen:

Yeah, and I think that's brilliant. If there could be a silver lining from the pandemic, there's not many, are there? But I think one of them is this resilience of the local community and realizing how important it's to support those businesses and how much they will do for you. We have some elderly customers that have shopped with us for about 30 years, and when you couldn't get hold of loo roll, we had lots of loo roll because we buy things like that in the business in bulk. It's the way businesses operate, isn't it? You do a big job lot order. And so we were sending loo roll along with meat to some of our customers who couldn't get it.

There is that sense of sharing and helping. And I think it is lovely that lots of people have stuck with us. And I think that's the other thing is they noticed actually how different Pipers Farm food is from the food they were buying from the supermarket, how much better they felt physically, but also better for being able to support a system like that, and actually potentially realizing that the cost is not that dissimilar. What you might buy from Waitrose is not that dissimilar price to what you might buy from Pipers, but all of the good that that food does to that local community, there have been lots of people that have stuck with us, which is lovely.

Mark Greaves:

We always talk about the pandemic on this podcast. It was a horrible period, but there were some lessons and good stuff that came out of there. And the food resilience focus, the reducing food miles, the knowledge that it wasn't about squeezing every last drop of blood out of the supply chain to make it as efficient, because it can go wrong. And Ukraine has, again, reemphasized that. We need a much more resilient food chain in this country. Is there anything, if you took power for a day tomorrow, what's the one thing that government could actually help? Just pick on one. I know there's probably about 4,000, but is there one thing they could change?

Abby Allen:

That's a dangerous question to ask me because I've got a very long list and I'd very happily take over tomorrow. No, I'm kidding. No, I think really recognising the incredible value of our farmers has to happen at some point. It shocks me sometimes, the sort of narrative around farmers. They are blamed for so many things, when actually, quite a lot of those things that they had to do were driven from government schemes. So taking out hedgerows to make sure that we are producing more food, digging into peat, because that was another scheme that happened in the 1970s. There is so much that government has driven farmers to do that has been the wrong way of doing things, yet the farmer has been blamed for that.

So I think really understanding the incredible value that the farming community have in this country, and that's not in just being more resilient and producing local food. It's looking after the environment, looking at increasing wetlands, planting trees, planting hedgerows, all of this stuff to help us mitigate and create better environments for people, allowing more green space. You look at places like Exmoor and Dartmoor. They are such a hugely important area for people to access for their own mental wellbeing, for their own enjoyment, for recreation. And it's farmers that are maintaining those landscapes with a real passion to do it that we can all benefit from.

Clean air, clean water, and the impact of producing much better food would have on the NHS, my list goes on and on. There is so much power that the farming community have, more so possibly than any other industry in this country. I'm happy to say that, the impact that they have, and I think we just have to recognize that. We have to find a way to really support that and encourage more farmers to farm in a better way.

Mark Greaves:

I think I'd probably take that and summarise it up. It would be nice to have some joined-up thinking, actually looking across things rather than just pick, "Oh, I'm going to make this metric or this KPI go up," without noticing others go down. What we must come onto, because there's a bit of this I really love, you co-authored the Sustainable Meat Cookbook, which has the best subtitle I think I've ever read of any book, being Recipes and Wisdom for Considered Carnivores, which I'm now adopting as my title. What drove you to write a book? Do you want to explain what the book is and then how you came to author it?

Abby Allen:

Yeah. So we were so honored to be approached by a publisher a few years ago that said, "We love what you guys do. We follow you on social media, and we love the stories that you tell. Would you like to create a book?" And I sort of couldn't quite believe it when it happened. And basically, the idea was if anybody follows Pipers Farm on Instagram, you'll be used this kind of tapestry of beautiful recipes, very simple, very seasonal, lovely wholesome food to feed your family, giving you lots of different inspiration about how to maybe use cuts that you didn't really know about. And then alongside that, we love to tell the story of the food that we're producing. So showing off our farmers maybe picking subjects why it's really important to support the small-scale abattoir, because without them, sustainable and ethical meat doesn't exist.

And so the idea for the book was really to pick up that collection of lovely seasonal recipes, and also pick some of these slightly important subjects and give them a bit of life and write some essays. So it's more than just a cookbook. It kind of takes you through a seasonal year on the farm, and it talks about... there's some stories in there that really talk about things that are impacting our food system. So that was kind of the concept for it, and it was just so wonderful to be asked to write something. And I immediately had imposter syndrome and thought, "Oh, God, how can I write a cookbook? This seems a huge project."

So of course, in usual style, it was about being collaborative, and I rang up a load of chef mates and said, "Look, guys, would you help me on this? Would you put an arm around me and give me a bit of guidance?" One of them was the lovely Gil Miller who has written many a brilliant book in his time, and he was very generous with helping with his knowledge and guidance. And then we pulled a book together, and it was an amazing experience, especially hearing Radio Four listed it as one of their best books of the year, and the Telegraph said it was best book to come out this year. And it was a pretty huge honor. And again, to have farming and food recognized on that kind of national level was just mind blowing, really.

Mark Greaves:

What we will try and do, and we don't often do this, is that you have done another podcast, we're not jealous, called Ancestral Kitchy, which I just about managed to pronounce, which is quite a long chat into it and about it, et cetera, and I highly recommend people going and listening to that one as well, once they're finished with this podcast, of course. Could I perhaps therefore end on could you pick a favorite recipe and a favorite essay, I'll describe them as, from that cookbook?

Abby Allen:

Oh, it's like picking your favourite child, isn't it? It's so hard. I think probably one of my favorite recipes is one that I quite often make for people that come over, because it's so simple. It's like the easiest thing in the world and makes you look like the best chef. So I quite like that as a concept, and it takes so little time to do it. But it's a chicken thigh recipe with cider brandy, cream, and black pudding. I know that might all sound totally bonkers and rich, but it's a couple of the best things from the southwest.

You think really gorgeous luscious cream, the most amazing cider brandy from the... I always use the Kingston Black Cider from Somerset Cider Brandy company because I just think it's incredible. And then the black pudding, which if anybody's a bit scared about eating that kind of food, it's really not that noticeable in the dish. You don't kind of go, "Oh my God, it's full of black pudding. I'm terrified." It's a really great way to encourage people to eat something slightly unusual, and it is just so luxurious and indulgent, but so simple and hearty. So especially on a sort of like a cold, wintry, autumnal day, it's a really, really hearty feast and super easy to make. So that would probably be my recipe of choice.

And then in terms of an essay, I think probably the most important for anybody to read in the book, other than perhaps the one on abattoirs, which I think I'm very passionate about campaigning for abattoirs, is the disappearance of small-scale family farms. It's a real threat that we're facing at the moment with the way the food system is going, with the way that we're changing to this kind of more import-based way of procuring food. Family farms are facing a really, really difficult time. As we kind of touched on a bit earlier, the pressures of the supermarket model, we are losing family farms, and with that, we're losing the knowledge. And so I think that's the most important essay to read, because it really is something that I would love people to fully understand the implications of.

Mark Greaves:

That's a brilliant lesson to end our podcast on. I think the only thing we're going to have to do with this podcast, we're going to have to put a warning out beforehand that they need to eat something beforehand, just prepare for it, else they'll be salivating at the end of that. Thank you so much for joining us today, Abby, and sharing your story with our listeners. Hopefully, they'll have enjoyed it as much, and then they'll immediately go away and start looking at cooking black pudding and chicken, et cetera. And thank you to our audience for listening to our latest episode of Business Noodles. Hope that they've enjoyed our conversation. Don't forget to subscribe to this podcast, the updates, and notifications on when our latest episodes are available. Thank you.