We’re Sam and Elliot Day; two food obsessed brothers who left the farm in Devon for the big city. After three years running a successful restaurant in London, we decided to turn our love of home-cooked food into a business and set up FieldGoods in 2020. The dream? To make amazing comfort food from carefully-sourced, sustainable suppliers, sent from our kitchen to your table.
We know you hear it a lot these days, but we really are serious about sustainability. Our trays and sleeves are made from responsibly sourced plant-based materials, so they can be chucked onto your compost pile or food bin and be plant food before you know it. You can also give them a wash and pop them in your recycling. Let’s make landfill a thing of the past, one delicious dinner at a time!
We’ve teamed up with packaging specialist Huhtamaki who are spearheading the new wave of compostable disposable packaging.
Making the trays from Scandinavian wood pulp and a thin layer of potato starch bio laminate (for waterproofness), they are 100% home compostable! After use you can put it straight into your food waste bin and within 90 days it will have broken down into plant food! Or alternatively you can also rinse the inside and recycle it with your paper!
The branded tray sleeve is also 100% compostable and recyclable. All the ink and glue are vegetable and water-based products meaning that dissolve straight back into nature where they came from! Not only that but they are manufactured using only renewable energy!
There is always one! Unfortunately a compostable oven proof film doesn’t exist... yet! We are in touch with many different suppliers who are working hard to create such a product, as soon as it launches we are at the front of the queue! Until then, please wash the film and put it into your recycling bin with your other plastics.
We admit it, we’re pretty proud of our meat. We use 100% free range, English meat, and always will. We’ve teamed up with the mighty Yorkshire butchers at Swaledale, who supply us with high grade native breed meat. Their goal is not to achieve the biggest animal in the shortest period of time (nasty business), but simply to produce meat that is exceptional to cook and eat. Because ultimately, the flavour and quality of a dish goes hand in hand with the welfare of the animal.
The native breed animals they use at Swaledale are slower to mature. This, along with munching mostly grass and hay, means highly flavourful, beautifully marbled meat.
Swaledale really cares. A good way of knowing this is by looking at the age of the animals – the cattle that they use are between 4-6 years old. That’s compared with your commercial animals (used by supermarkets, you know the kind) who are typically around 14 months old. So whether it’s the free range chickens that cluck away on Ed Wilkinson’s farm, or the Belted Galloways that happily roam Tom Boothman’s hills, every animal matters.
What breeds are we talking?
Cattle: Belted Galloway, Dexter, Aberdeen Angus, Highland
Pigs: Middle-white, Tamworth
Sheep: Ryeland, Teeswater
Chicken: Ross
It took a whole lot of talking, listening and learning, but after following some stellar advice from the best in the business, we finally found the fishmonger for us. Marrfish really are leaps and bounds ahead of the rest, not just in the quality of their catches but in their careful practice.
Marrfish are a MSC certified company, and use shiny state of the art radars to assess the age of the fish before casting their nets to avoid catching young fish. They are also part of the Fishing For Litter Scheme, encouraging skippers to bring rubbish back to the shore by paying them per tonne. Which, when you think about it, is kind of what you’re doing now. By buying FieldGoods, you’re supporting hardworking fishermen and farmers who care about the planet. Good on you.
Another worry of ours was those pesky polystyrene boxes used to deliver fish. But Marrfish have this covered (of course they do). They deliver all their catches in cardboard boxes with a recyclable plastic lining. This simple move will prevent tonnes of polystyrene ending up in landfill. Clever Marrfish.
White fish: coley
Most of the time it’s coley. If the vessels are affected by the weather, we will very occasionally switch to Ling. Both of these are tasty substitutes to cod, with a similar texture and flavour. Perfect in a fish pie.
White fish: plaice, cod and halibut
We’ll never set out to only use these fish, because they are currently under threat from overfishing. But the truth is, so many restaurants in the UK will only use prime cuts of fish. Which means fishmongers are often left with tiny cuts that can’t be sold as fillets. To stop these being wasted, we’ve decided to buy the smaller cuts. They work perfectly in our fish pie.
Smoked fish: haddock
We know haddock is a seriously popular fish in the UK, and is subject to overfishing. Just so you know, we only use haddock that’s been caught by MSC certified vessels off the coast of Scotland (sometimes Iceland too), where the haddock has a sustainability rating of 2. If you’d like to dive a little deeper into this, head to the MSC website and search areas FAO 27 – 4, 6a, 3a.20 and 5a to see the exact areas our haddock comes from.
Pink fish: ChalkStream trout
We don’t like to play favourites, but ChalkStream is definitely one of our most exciting suppliers. These guys have managed to turn fish farming on its head. Using water from the River Itchen and Test, the farms have fully segregated systems, minimising the impact on the unique chalk stream environments of the main rivers. A current flows through the waterways, so the fish can swim against the flow. Just like us hitting the gym pool, this stops the fish from building up a high fat content (a common issue with farmed fish). ChalkStream has been awarded with RSPCA Assured welfare standards for salmon and trout. Which is a pretty incredible achievement, and means we can all feel good about tucking in.
If these guys love it, it must be good...
“Beautiful farmed trout, this product is amazing! ChalkStream should be really proud.” - Jamie Oliver
“There has been a trout revival recently, largely down to the passion of producers such as ChalkStream.” - Yotam Ottolenghi
