Martin Hopkins has two loves in his life. One is for his nut-allergic girl friend, Lucy, the inspiration behind Safe to Eat Foods - the other is for clean pipes! And both are crucial to the success of the Safe to Eat brand.

Martin knew nothing about allergies when he met Lucy eight years ago - but he did know about food and food factories. Having originally studied engineering he changed career in his mid-twenties to spend three years training to be a chef, first at an Italian restaurant in London and then in Brindisi. Along the way, he combined his skills to help in the design of food factories.

Although one of Martin’s childhood friends had been a coeliac, meeting Lucy was a revelation. Until a chance peck on the cheek with peanutty lips caused a dramatic reaction Martin had no idea how careful nut-allergic people needed to be - or how restricted their lives were by their allergies.

No quick trips to the Indian restaurant round the corner or calls for a take-away if you don’t feel like cooking; no relaxing with a few drinks at a party lest someone has been eating nuts and you touch their hand; no travelling on an airplane without exhaustive checks on their nut policy and, no matter how careful you are, always the chance that a nut will escape your vigilance and only the speedy use of an EpiPen will lie between you and an early demise.

To make matters worse, there was then, and things are not that much better now, very little that you can buy ready made - and virtually nothing savoury.

Assessing the market
Very soon after they met, Martin started to look at the possibilities of an allergen-free range of savoury foods but this was back in 2000 and he got very little interest from the supermarkets or the mainstream press. However, he did not abandon the idea and, five years later, the reaction was very different.

Savoury - and flavoursome
Martin’s main criteria in setting up Safe to Eat were to create really delicious savoury products, made from ‘real’ ingredients, which would allow those with potentially life threatening allergies to gluten, peanuts, nuts, dairy, egg, wheat, sesame, fish, soya, mustard, celery and sulphites to eat exciting, tasty and even exotic food without having to cook it all themselves. And to make it tasty enough for the whole family to want to eat it too.

Although future plans do include ready meals, he decided to start with soups and sauces which were relatively simple to make and to pack.
To date they can offer eight ‘cook-in’ sauces (two Indian, two Chinese, one Moroccan and three Italian), four ‘pour-over’ sauces (including vodka and fennel and pear and white wine) and five soups (traditional tomato; Italian four bean; sweet potato and spinach; carrot, leek and ginger, and spicy Mexican bean).

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