TasteConnection

TasteConnection is part of Nactarome Ltd, a fast-growing, Europe-based group of companies creating and manufacturing high quality natural taste and colour solutions for speciality products. It has around 80 employees across three sites in Gloucestershire: a warehouse in Kingswood, a site in Clevedon making liquid flavouring and a manufacturing and laboratory based in Alderley.

Next time you tuck into a packet of crisps, the chances are the tasty flavour adding a touch of spice to your snack was probably created by the team at TasteConnection. That’s because the company, based near Wotton-under-Edge in Gloucestershire, imports spices from around the world in order to create flavours for a variety of snacks including those of major UK crisp manufacturers. The company was established in 2002 by three friends, initially working from their homes. After four years, they moved on to the site of a former trout farm in the rural village of Alderley where they established a manufacturing base and laboratory, where they could create and test new flavours. However, as the company expanded their need for faster, more reliable broadband grew.

TasteConnection Director Andrew Sainsbury said: “Before Gigaclear, we were dependant on a part fibre, copper wire broadband connection that was only giving us 4 or 5Mbps. It was very limiting.” It just so happened that prior to the pandemic in 2019, Andrew had been part of a group trying to encourage Fastershire, [a government-funded partnership between Gloucestershire County Council and Herefordshire Council to bring faster broadband to hard-to-reach rural communities], to support the roll-out of full fibre locally. Andrew said: “When Covid struck, we suddenly became key workers as we were in the food industry. Either our staff wanted to work from home or we needed them to, and this generated lots more Teams and Zoom calls. This is where we really began to encounter difficulties because our broadband couldn’t cope. It began to have a real effect on the business.” A series of meetings were held with Government officials and Gigaclear during which Andrew explained that his business was beginning to suffer. The decision was taken to prioritise their connection, with Gigaclear completing the work in 2020. “As a result of this we were able to continue doing business,” said Andrew. “It was that critical!”

“Having an up to 1Gb full fibre broadband connection has been critical to our business not least because it has enabled us to migrate to a best-in-class SAP [Systems, Applications & Products in Data Processing] ERP cloud-based IT system. We have no servers on site at all. We’re able to access the same world class digital software packages as any other company – our ambitions are no longer limited by our broadband. “With the old copper connection, not only was it slow but we had outages all the time. With Gigaclear, we’ve only had one in nearly four years, and that wasn’t their fault – and they fixed it quickly. It’s been a fantastic service.”

One additional benefit was that, when negotiating the sale of the business in 2021 to the Nactarome group, based in Italy, Andrew and his fellow directors could do so confident there wouldn’t be any buffering or that their broadband connection would drop out during the discussions. He said: “Now, as part of a larger European group of companies, I think we would have struggled to stay in Alderley if we didn’t have the sort of connectivity that Gigaclear’s full fibre provides us. That would have been a great shame because it’s a beautiful rural environment and our employees really value the outside space we have.”