Meet the man who has tasted all the shortbread in Britain

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/oct/04/scottish-shortbread-ben-nevis-bakery

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It all started way back in 1981, when the last bakery in Fort William closed. I was trained as a chef and had been working mainly in hotel kitchens. I had always liked baking, though, so I decided this was an opportunity.

With help from the loan guarantee scheme, we started a home craft bakery, with our own shop. We gradually got into wholesale, supplying shops within a 60-mile radius of Fort William with fresh baked goods, such as pies and breads. We did that successfully for about 10 years then decided to expand into pound loaf cakes. We started with two different flavours, cherry and sultana, and now do a range of 12. We’d always done shortbread on a small scale, but it wasn’t until we moved to a bigger factory in 1998 that we were able to offer it on a national scale.

I do the recipe development myself. As a kid, I was always watching my mum in the kitchen. She taught me a lot – that bakers should have light fingers, especially for scones and things like that. I also learned many recipes from her that I still use – especially the shortbread. We’ve tweaked the recipe over the years: our shortbread is much the same in flavour, but the texture is shorter. In the old days, shortbread was harder; ours melts in your mouth.

My wife and I started the business together, and it is still one big family. The bakery has a staff of about 30 people, most of whom have been here for a considerable length of time, quite a few from day one. My son Paul is production manager and my daughter Hazel is our finance and admin manager. My wife, sadly, has had to retire through illness.

About a year ago we were approached to develop new shortbread lines for Selfridges. We experimented with many different flavours – rose petal, lavender, earl grey, chai tea – before settling on four: double chocolate, stem ginger, plain and demerara, which is one of our best sellers. We’ve just launched the range and the response has been wonderful – it is flying off the shelves. Selfridges’ sister company in the US and Canada, Holt Renfrew, has now requested the range for its Christmas store, which is exciting.

If you saw me you could probably tell that I eat a lot of shortbread. You can’t be doing product development without tasting the product! I taste it all; if it’s not right, it doesn’t go out. I’ve trained other people to know what makes it good – the crunch when you bite into it, the colour, the feel … This does make me very critical: you could lay every kind of shortbread that exists out in front of me and I would be able to tell you who made it, especially the Scottish ones.

Our bakery sits in the foothills of Ben Nevis. I can more or less see the summit from my office. It’s a beautiful part of the world, and I couldn’t wish for a better place to live. I’ve been here for the best part of 45 years, and every day it’s different. I never tire of it.