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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Two years ago, we went off the rails, talking and tasting food on railways and in railway stations here and around the world with Asia traveller and writer Caroline Eden and travel journalist Simon Calder. If you like that, I think you might enjoy this. Food on motorways, why it is the way it is, what it used to be and what a different model already up and working could do for us all.
For this week's food programme, we're on a road trip, heading to those in-between places. A stop for a tea, a pee, and maybe a bite to eat while en route from A to B. They're functional and necessary, with almost a poetry to their names.
Burton Wood, Hartshead Moor, Woolly Edge, Membury, Lee Delamere, Taunton Dean, Birch Hanger, Pease Pottage. which is a very good name. It sounds like a service station and a meal.
In this programme, we're going to try to find out what that almost poetry tells us about meals on the road, about Britain and about us. The UK has about 100 motorway service areas, MSAs in the jargon, keeping us travelling public fed and watered.
They were built exactly where they are, no further than 28 miles apart, to give drivers the chance of a break from the wheel every two hours or so, standards set by the Ministry of Transport. The most recent surveys suggest most of us are fairly happy with what these rest stops provide. I'm Louise Coward and I'm Head of Insight and Evidence at Transport Focus.
So we're the watchdog for transport users. When you go in, there's lots of brands.
There used to be limited brands and the main offering may have felt a bit like school dinners, but now it's a bright environment as a choice of familiar brands across a range of budgets.
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Chapter 2: What is the history of motorway service stations in the UK?
MUSIC The advent of the motorways ushered in a new age of opportunity according to a grand pomp and circumstance film produced in 1959 by the Midland Region Film Unit of the BBC.
This is the beginning of something new, something in which up to now Britain has been lagging a quarter of a century behind the times and behind most other countries. This first stretch of the London to Yorkshire motorway up to Birmingham is the start of a network of brand new highways. Eventually that network will cover the whole country.
But Transport Minister Ernest Marples had stern words of warning.
It will bring immense benefits if drivers use discipline, common sense and obey the rules. But disaster and tragedy may descend on those who drive recklessly or selfishly. For on this magnificent road, the speed which can easily be reached is so great that senses may be numbed and judgment warped.
The arrival of these warp-speed motorways heralded the dawn of the service station.
Motor vehicles can't run without petrol. On this side, the planning hasn't kept pace with the building of the motorway. But here's Frederick Carter, the architect of one of the two service stations which are to be built. If, having replenished your car, you require refreshment, Then you go through there where there is a restaurant facilities, a transport cafe, toilet facilities.
I'm Dr David Lawrence. I'm an associate professor at Kingston University London and I've spent much of my adult life researching motorway service areas, visiting them, staying at them and generally immersing myself in the wonderful world of motorway services. Service stations were created by the government simply to stop people crashing their cars.
People crashing because they were hungry or they needed the toilet. That's the only reason the government wanted service stations back in the late 1950s. And they had no recognisable brands. Everything was slightly out of place. And to me, they were, I suppose, bits of town dumped down in the country. What food was on offer? It was transport cafe food with a bit more glamour.
So essentially fried English food, tea, coffee. Some places had zero alcohol beer, even in the early 1960s. And as the industry began to realise that it had a totally captive audience, and that's really important to remember for the future of motorway service stations, this captive audience could be served anything, really. In some places, very simple food and some sandwiches were provided.
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Chapter 3: How do motorists perceive the quality of food at service stations?
We have some sites that we lease from the government. And we have some sites that we lease from private landlords, a real mixed bag. Some of our government leases have just been renewed recently. We're really, really proud to announce that. Some long leases with the government, which is a fantastic partnership that we have with them.
Rochef just recently secured extensions to five of its services at Clackett Lane, Watford Gap, Northampton, Sandbatch and Strensham for 75 years, positively biblical. Dan, those new leases, they're for a pretty long time.
It is a long period of time and we're really proud to be able to strike that relationship with National Highways and the government because we know that we play a really important part in the motorway network. I suppose the length of time that we want is as long as possible. Clearly we want security of tenure, we want the ability to invest.
Often motorway service areas are quite expensive places to maintain, to build, to grow, to develop and thrive. Our ability to do that is predicated on knowledge that we will be able to operate at those sites for years to come. Very long leases from the government for some of these sites, but ownership of those leases is something else. It's a complicated story, but worth a listen.
The leases change more frequently because they're owned by private equity companies. Private equity is the collective name for companies and funds that borrow money on the global market from investors to reinvest in companies usually for five to ten years, hoping for a high return.
Private equity because, well, the public has no right to know where the invested money comes from or the details of what they do with it. And if you're running a private equity firm, you're looking for what the financial industry calls cash cows. And some believe motorway service stations are cash cows par excellence, as millions of us dash up and down motorways needing what they offer.
So, currently, Moto is owned by a fund set up by the university's superannuation scheme, a pension fund for academics, in partnership with CVC Capital Partners, a Jersey-based private equity company. Until 2015, they were owned by another P.E. giant, the one that now owns Roadchef. Welcome Break is owned by Apple Green. They run motorway services in the U.S. and Ireland and are, in turn,
majority owned by the largest private equity company in the world, Blackstone, based in the USA. And they are big investors in UK real estate. Roadchef is owned by a private equity fund run by the Australian bank Macquarie. Macquarie became well-known in the UK when another of its funds owned Thames Water from 2006 to 2017.
I asked Brands Director Dan Sutton how private equity ownership affects how Road Chef is run. He said he couldn't speak for Macquarie, but presumed they see an opportunity to add value to our business, investing in new service stations, electric vehicle charging and improving the experience in our hotels, food and beverage.
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Chapter 4: What unique food offerings can be found at Tebay Services?
Because they've said there's nobody lives here and there's no business here. So we don't believe we could put a viable business on this area.
And none of them bid. None of them bid. And so my wife and I talked about it and we decided we would bid.
And the rest... If only those people could come back and see this place today. I mean, how wrong, how totally, totally wrong they were. They assumed, because motorway service areas were all pretty well equally bad, that they all get a bit of a share of... of what's available on the motorway. If you suddenly come and do something different that may be rather better, more of them will come.
You know? Simples. So from the very beginning, you thought this was going to be different and was going to provide employment for people thrown out of work and people as farming shrank. And because you were a farmer, this led you to think that you would link up with local farmers, that they could be linked to what food you were offering.
When we began, our partners were bakers. So we bought all their bread and their cakes and things and we were hitched to them. We had a 50-50 business and we were hitched to them. And gradually other suppliers brought other things. We brought the milk to it until we went out of milk.
And the growth of suppliers came in. The farm shops started almost the time that Sarah was taking over. So all that... energy and ingenuity from a foodie, because she's passionate about food, came really with her. Sarah is John's daughter. After a flirtation with investment banking in the city, Sarah Dunning came home to Cumbria and now chairs the expanding family business called Westmoreland.
From a 40-seater restaurant serving simple home-cooked food at Teabay, The Westman & Group has grown massively. They own Gloucester Services on the M5, Cairn Lodge on the M74, and are in the early stages of building their fourth enterprise on the M56 in Tatton in Cheshire.
Turnover is now just under 150 million, with about 10 million customers a year, around 1,200 staff, and a food business that's still heavily focused on local food from local suppliers. The central ethos is the same as it was in the beginning, which is basically what mum and dad set up, which is just a service station that celebrates place.
So if you look at where we are here, you know, it feels like an agricultural barn, looks like an agricultural barn from the outside. It's full of old reclaimed timbers. The food, we're standing in the food hall here. The food is really simple but it's fresh, it's made in our kitchens and it's good food. That young lad said it was the perfect place to work. Aww, that was nice.
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Chapter 5: How does local sourcing impact service station food?
I've never heard it all done by whistles before. Here they come. And you've got come by, which is to the left, and the whistle for left is... WHISTLE BLOWS and that's a walk on. Come by, come by, lie down.
Out of our 500 ewes we'll have 700 to 800 lambs and we'll keep some of them as replacements for our breeding flock but everything else then will go through the services through the farm shop and sold at the butchery counter or at the carvery in the restaurants. shows you what throughput that they have in that shop. Yeah, it's amazing really and this farm alone can't just keep that going.
We keep it going in our peak season so August to the end of January it's all lamb from the farm and then through the winter months a lot of our beef goes through the farm shop but in the shoulders of the seasons where this farm can't produce or provide that they then look at other farmers that are local and are like-minded.
So what other little corners are there of the farm production that we might not? We've got six colonies of bees on the farm and we work with the Lake District Honey Company. And last year we had the same number last year and we had 70 kilograms of honey, which was about 140 jars of honey at the end of the season.
So not only do we get the honey, they help us pollinate the hedgerows, the herbal lees and the hay meadows. So it's a win-win for us. We haven't mentioned the sheepskins. Well, we saw them in the shop, but I mean, they come from this farm too. Some of them come from the farm as well. So everything really gets utilised. Sian Morgan.
But to understand more about how Teabay impacts the local economy, we went to see two independent suppliers. On the outskirts of Kendal, on a small industrial estate, is Moore, an artisan bakery founded by Patrick Moore, who'd been supplying Teabay for 20 years.
We are a busy little bakery. This is what we thrive on. This is our bread and jam. We're very much caretakers, really, of the product. And 20 years ago, when we first started, the best bread you could get in the country was really Bake Off.
faux crusty baguette that was full of chemicals and no skill involved at all so you know we were kind of one of the early ones very much inspired by the likes of Paulin in France you know that's always been our core values and it's in our DNA and we actually share that with Westmoreland because over
You know, that entire period, Westmoreland has had exactly the same DNA and really, from the very beginning, wanted to cut out any unnecessary chemicals or added ingredients, you know, that may be harmful to health. And it's really on the back of that and that synergy between us as two independent businesses,
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Chapter 6: What changes are being made to improve food options for lorry drivers?
Very much so, yes.
What's your approach to the perfect poached egg?
Give it a good stir, get that swirl, and then crack your egg in. My name is David Hatherall, I'm Managing Director of Chippenham Pit Stop in Wiltshire.
My name is Hannah Hatherall and I am Marketing Director at Chippenham Pit Stop.
A lot of truckers will say anything but chips. So if you ask a man on the street what the truckers eat, most of them will come up with bacon and eggs and Yorkie bars and chips. Yes, they do, but then don't we all enjoy a treat? The fact is, if you're out on the road four or five nights a week, you don't want chips every night.
You just crave a pork chop and some veg and some mash and some gravy or whatever, just like you would at home.
I think Kerry in your kitchen, Kerry Cook, the cook, was mentioning that you've shifted to poached eggs as an option anyway. And little nudges like that presumably all add up to a slightly healthier routine for you.
Yeah, I mean, we really try and have a lot of variety. In fact, we've got a burger on the menu at the moment with avocado in it.
And some of the truck drivers, what? Avocado? Why do we want to have avocado in our burger? It's just a healthy option. And some of them say, oh, no, I'm not interested in that. And then others are like, actually, do you know what? That's a really good combination. You know, a nice burger with a sliced avocado on top. Brilliant.
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Chapter 7: How do family-owned service stations differ from corporate ones?
Well, that might be a nice thing.
It's really nice the next day though. Leftovers are always better. Well, yeah, yeah.
Lorry drivers Eddie and Ritz at Chippenham Pit Stop looking for healthier alternatives on the road, even if that means cooking in their own cabs. There are some signs beyond the spread of brands that show the big players might be up for that imaginative change AA's president Edmund King mentioned.
Change like Road Chef's first farm shop at Sedgemore Services that opened last year on the M5 in Somerset, stocking food and drink from more than 40 local producers, perhaps taking a hint from Teabay in Cumbria.
What a new model of local, regional, resilient food production there might be, creating local jobs, producing fresher, better food, if every one of our 90-plus motorway service stations linked itself to the land and the people around it. Is that a utopian idea? Well, maybe. Sarah Dunning, though, chair of a company who does just that, doesn't think there's anything utopian about it at all.
It is possible to create businesses that have their own model and infrastructure that in our case it's about local impact and it's about having a hub in a place. Businesses like ours, they prove that it can be done and I think our job is to carry on pushing and carry on trying to do that in other places and grow and show that it can be done because it can be done. Thanks for listening.
This edition of Radio 4's The Food Programme was presented by me, Sheila Dillon, and produced in Bristol by Robin Markwell.
Why do some brilliant business ideas come a cropper? I'm Sean Farrington and in a new series of Toast I'll be looking at five more brands, businesses and wonder products which offered a lot but didn't stick around. Including a budget cinema selling tickets for 20 pence and the toilet paper we knew from school.
I remember worrying about getting paper cuts in an area that you wouldn't wish to be getting a paper cut. Finding out what we can learn from their disappearance. Toast from BBC Radio 4. Listen first on BBC Sounds. Hei, mä lähden nyt oikeasti. Mä oon lomalla.
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