Let's get creative

A few jaws dropped when Chris Lightfoot decided to give up a glittering career in the restaurant business and try his hand as a development chef. A brief glance at his resumé should explain why... 1991-93: Le Manoir aux Quat Saisons under the tutelage of Raymond Blanc; 1993: Harvey's with Marco Pierre White (who won three Michelin stars aged just 33); 1994: Heatcotes Longridge with Paul Heatcotes and Andy Barnes;1994-96: Gidleigh Park with Michael Caines.

For those unfamiliar with this who's who of UK gastronomy, it really doesn't get any better than this - every restaurant on the above list has two Michelin stars.

No offence to Geest, which lured Lightfoot onto its payroll in 1998, but if it's a toss up between cooking up a lamb shank with Marco Pierre and value engineering ready meals for supermarkets, what would you choose?

"A lot of my friends thought I was making a big mistake," admits Lightfoot, who now runs a product development consultancy and works very closely with ingredients giant National Starch. "But I'd always been thinking about moving into development. I'd got 10 years of solid training under my belt with some of the best chefs in the business, and I wanted to try something new."

A development chef is not simply someone who comes up with a great dish and then has to spend the next month working out how to make it 20p cheaper, insists Lightfoot. "I don't see my job as being about continually making compromises. This is where the tricks of the trade come in. It's knowing that using a small amount of basil oil rather than 20g of fresh chopped basil can deliver the same flavour." Today, much of Lightfoot's time is spent working with manufacturers to develop products using ingredients such as Novation native starches and Homecraft flours from National Starch, which can offer the consistency, temperature and shear tolerance, freeze/thaw stability and shelf-life of modified starches, but with that all-important clean label.

This has taken some clients a while to get used to, he admits. "It's like anything new, you have to get used to working with it and some people just use the new ingredients in exactly the same way they used the old ones, and wonder why they don't get exactly the same results.

"That frustrates me, but I try to remind myself that their backs are against the wall and they are looking for an instant solution. My advice would be to pick up the phone, ring the supplier and work it out. "We know these ingredients inside out so we can tell them that product X will work in the kitchen, but product Y will work in the factory."

Manufacturers used to develop products for retailers' own-label ranges a year in advance, says Lightfoot. Today, they have to work up concepts in weeks. "Sometimes, I have 24 hours to come up with an idea."

The skill set required by a development chef is very different to that required in a Michelin-starred restaurant, says Lightfoot.

Food manufacturers need creative people that can cook (that always helps) and who are also food scientists, technicians, engineers, accountants, sales people and project planners. In short, the kind of person the education system simply doesn't produce, he says.

"There are chefs out there that don't make the transition [into food manufacturing] very well," says Lightfoot. "But there are also development technologists that don't know how to make a basic white sauce."

A chef doesn't want to be told this is what ingredient X does, says Lightfoot. He wants to work with it in his kitchen and actually find out what it does before thinking how much it will cost and whether it will work in the factory.

"If you allow these constraints to limit what you do from the outset, you'll never develop anything new."