Ultrasonic Pickles

"Hello and welcome, you're listening to Food Rebels and I'm AJ Sharp. Today's guest is someone who looked at an everyday food item and asked what if we didn't just accept it as it is. I'm joined by Matt Harris, founder of Pickle Project, a business that launched in late 2024 with a bold aim to completely rethink British Pickles, not by nostalgia and not by tradition but by going deep into the science of flavour. Matt is a former racing car driver, turned food obsessive and a man who once drunkenly bought an ambulance on eBay and turned it into a barbecue lab. You are going to have to tell us the background behind that. I hope our researchers have got that right." Pickle Project has already picked up two great taste styles landed in a car dough and is using ultrasound, unusual botanicals and a very engineer-led mindset to make Pickles that actually taste exciting. Welcome, Matt. "Thank you for having me." I looked at the research notes before we came on air and just were, "This sounds epic! I mean, I don't even know where to start with the questions. There's a lot of questions I have around the drunken ambulance purchase. Can we start there? I mean, why?" Well, there was a little bit more thought to just completely spontaneously buy an ambulance while hammered, but after my sort of motor racing career ended due to the 2008 recession, I lost all my sponsorship. I'd been living in the US, but I fell in love with American food, particularly like fried chicken, American barbecue, that I'd had KFC maybe two or three times. I'd eaten ribs in T.J. Fridays. That whole world was new to me. So it came home, and I got a really rubbish job and passionately hated my life. And I needed something to fill the gap that racing had left behind and I turned out to be cooking and I just went really off the deep end into the food science stuff and before you know, a kitchen's from a nice shit and flamethrower, as it gives me those, and all kinds of weird stuff. Amazing. At around that time, street food was just the coolest thing in the universe, and I really wanted to get involved, but I didn't have any experience in hospitality or catering or anything else. So drunk me thought it was a really good idea, and I had the balls to do it, whereas so for me probably didn't. I love it. It's so good. I mean, why not? So for anyone who hasn't come across pickle project yet, what are you trying to do that's different in the world of pickles? Make them really, really good. I'm never going to say they're the best pickles in the world or anything, but I think I remember from when I lived in the US, you go into a Walmart, and there's like a quarter of my long aisle of just pickles, and you go to any massive supermarket over here, and you get a set of two foot wide shelf with a couple of different products. And I kind of, when I was first thinking about doing the business and part of the original idea behind pickle project was to try and convert people to liking pickles, because I just thought so many people don't like them. What I realised was most people don't like what's on the shelves, because it's not that great. It's kind of, there's so much innovation and sources and honey and everything, and yet this one staple hasn't had any innovation. It just seemed like a huge glaring opportunity to me, and we went into it really, really off the deep end. I love it. I have two regular guests that come on Eve Tudor and Ceezy Peltar, and Ceezy's one of the presenters or must have TV, and she, all three of us are absolutely pickle-obsessed. I think we've actually recorded an entire show called For the Love of Pickles, just because we love pickles, and they're just so beautiful when they're right. But I think a really bad pickle, for me, would be one that's in a really thin or very, very acidic, vinegary liquid, you know, it's just really out of balance, because the pickle is so beautiful, isn't it? Can you tell us, how do you make pickles? So I mean, there's a few different ways you can traditionally do it, which would be fermentation or you do it by adding vinegar, water, salt, whatever else, and then some herbs and spices. And then you kind of let those herbs and spices do their thing over time. But when I had this idea to make really, really good pickles, I wanted to kind of really look at the science of how to make them better. And thinking what are pickles really? It's vegetables in delicious liquids, who makes the most delicious liquids, people, what they call mixologists, I should probably call them. Anyway, I've found that quite a lot of them were using ultrasound as an example, like you can put it. So really low-quality whiskey gets some really good oak chips, thickmen, you blast it with high intensity sound lives, and that extracts lots of oaky flavour, and suddenly you've got delicious barrel aged whiskey. So then I kind of realised where you could do the same thing with herbs and spices. I'm where sort of nature designed a seed to have all its nutrients locked inside, like if you think of a block of peppercorn to kind of dull, but freshly cracked black pepper. All of that flavour is the side. So if you grind all the spices that we use into a really fine powder, add water, blast it with your super high intensity sound waves, and then extracts tons and tons of flavour, and then also we can do that in quite a brief bit of time, so that our pickle on day one is the same as it is on day 365. And then it unlocks the jaw to using all kinds of interesting ingredients. So it kind of looked at the, what are the compounds that make pickles pickily? And they are sort of flavour compounds like philandrine, and limonine, and carbon, all these very unexciting, sounding things. But then found sort of complementary ingredients that would help amplify different elements of that. So that led us to using some funky stuff like licorice root, which is quite literally a twig. And I don't think you buy a jar of pickles if it had twigs in it, but by being able to grind that up and then do the sound thing, we can extract some of that delicious flavour. And then add it to our pickles, just a very small amount. I mean they don't taste anything like licorice, but it's just there to try and amplify that pecky mess, and then instead of mint and cardamom, and all kinds of stuff that you would never normally see in a jar. But we have this delicious, clear, brine. So it's just a wonderfully complicated way of doing it. Like it's really hard. And it's taken a long time to work out. It kind of is abundantly clear while a lot of other people don't do it. But now that we've got the process worked out, it's working really, really well and scaling up very well. Right. There are too many questions here. Ultra sound. Ultra sound. What is ultra sound? So it's super fast sound waves or high frequency sound waves. So we basically have a big tank and you've got little ultrasound generators in the bottom. And they kind of, they just vibrate extremely fast. And those vibrations then resonate through the water. And as they're going through the water, it creates tiny little cavities or like a bubble. And as that implodes on itself, that creates a shock wave. And that helps extract extra flavour. So we can kind of probably end up in roughly the same result. But we'd have to leave our CD briny stuff at the mix for a few weeks to be able to extract that much flavour, whereas we could do it in the space of a couple of hours by using the software sound. Also, it kind of speeds up the infusion of flavours. Exactly. So we can knock tons of flavour out of all our herbs and spices. Then friends who are all through lovely clean brine. Love this. This is amazing. What is it in your mind that makes a pickle better? One pickle better than another pickle? It's a good question. I mean, personally, it's the balance of salt and acidity. And then kind of the background depth of flavour and all that stuff. All sweetness as well. We do a sweet one, not a sweet one. And then it's around the actual cucumber itself is how crunchy they are because there's like no one likes a frothy pickle. Yeah, absolutely. So I've got these two beautiful jars here. They're quite large jars, aren't they? How many do you get in these? That's quite good. So it's a 500 gram jar, but of the net weight is about 265 grams of cucumbers. We realise we have to do quite big jars because we today have been manually filling them. Wow. We used to use these sort of tall thin slender, really lovely looking jars, but the diameter that like the neck of the jar was almost exactly some diameters of the piece of cucumber. So it would just be me standing in a coal factory posting them in through the hole. Posting them in one by one, it was sold Australian. So anyway, we've got slightly wider bigger jar and a house bit easier. And also, who just wants one or two? If you're going to eat pickles, I might as well have the whole jar. Okay, so I've just opened the deli dill pickle chips, which is slightly almost like a mint greenie colour. It's not minty, but it's a lot green, isn't it? It is. They're kind of riff on the classic American style, what they call a kosher dill. So no sugar, vinegar, salt, and then our brine mix, and then lots of dill, big on there, sort of garlic after taste. Oh, it's lovely. It's really crunchy. The aroma, before you start, very dill and vinegar, but when you taste it, even though there's no added sugar at all, it's actually really, very naturally sweet, isn't it? The way the flavours are moving, with the zinginess and the kind of sour fermentation anything going on. And like you say, a lovely garlic finish. But it's a dilly, pickily, vinegary garlic finish. Yeah, that one was so difficult to try and make those special, because it's like, it's basically a dilly, garlicy pickle, like it tastes of dill and garlic. How would you make that special? So it took months and months of chewy king to get the flavours right. And I'm happy to say, he lives still well screwed on. And then so you're onto the sweet dill's next, which is our, sort of, it was our original product, and they got a two-star great taste last year. Which is hard to get, two-star great tastes, often, when they are some of the best products. I was absolutely feeling it wasn't three, but that's just because I'm competitive and petty. So this one is the sweet dill. Yeah. Is that right? Yeah, sweet dill pickle. Yeah, so more like a sort of plastic, like European style, much sweeter. So a little bit of garlic in there, quite a bit bit of dill, but then a different brine mix that goes into that one as well. Delicious and sweet and very accessible. And yeah, that will go on burgers and in salads and in all the places you'd expect to find it in a cheese sandwich. That is really good. I think, weirdly, even though it doesn't have a two-star, I feel like it deserves one. The dilly dill has more complexity to it, actually. But then I can see that the sweet dill is probably probably more popular widely, because it's sweet and delicious. A bit more accessible, yeah. It's always a good sign. Yeah. We launched the dilly dill's after the great taste of all its last year. So they've been entered for this year, so everything from across to that one. Cool. Wow, these are amazing. Thank you. So where can we buy them? Lots of places. Now, so we started off with a start of the business. I figured the whole thing was sort of, success was going to be fairly decaised on scale. So initially, wholesaleed into restaurants. So we're in a number of chains at the moment at which we do instead of big two and a half kilo of buckets. Then, middle and last, well, we started doing some jars fairly quickly, which went into a few sort of delis and farm shops and whatnot. But because of full-time job commitments and having red pay and all that was only working weekends on the pickles, it's quite a slow burn trying to sort of get traction on getting the pickles out there into retail. But then, it went full-time in November on pickles and it's gone like an absolute rocket. So we're in about hundreds shops and dillies at the moment, including places like Selfridges and Panzer's Denny and then very excitingly, we went live on a cargo in December. It's amazing. So everyone across the whole country can get it on a cargo as long as you're in the UK. We're actually awesome. There's so many different things here that are amazing. You've done this in a very short space of time to have gone from launch in 2024 to in a cargo by the end of 2025. It's so quick. But we're seeing this, aren't we? This is a big trend. The premiumisation of kitchen staples is really feeding in to what's happening with the UPF movement, where people are wanting pure products with beautiful clean labels like this of things that they know exactly what they are, cooking things from scratch, like just looking for better quality products. I mean, this is perfect for that, isn't it? Yeah, I think it fits really well. Actually, when I first looked at doing the recipes because I love all my sciencey nerdy stuff, I looked at cramming so much, like, chemistry into them because you can use all sorts of fun different ingredients to make them crunchier and more flavour and all that sort of stuff. But it just, it didn't feel right to do that. And I thought, actually, what I should do is make the best natural product with, you know, no missing about and nothing with 17 syllables in it on the label. Just keep it simple and keep it natural. And again, that seems to work really well. I agree completely. And we've definitely had a lot of that feedback. So I'm glad I made that decision early on. So tell me about the sciencey nerdy, hastiny sort of background. I mean, is your background in science or engineering or chemistry? No, my whole career is basically a cooking hobby that got really out of hand because I think when I was racing, certainly towards the latter parts of my career, I got to really understand how important it was to understand the engineering of the car because every nut and bolt can be adjusted and you have to be able to sort of understand how everything works. It makes more adjustment in front of the car. Suddenly the back of the car handle was very differently. As soon as I started cooking, my brain just went into that engineering mode and something as simple as, you know, you put a stake on a pan. You want the outside, nicely golden, crispy, and you want the inside nice and pink and juicy. So it was like, well, how could I make the outside more and the inside more? That immediately just took over everything. I think because I had this huge hole in my life from racing and I just needed something to sort of pour all of my my brain into and I just find it really fascinating when you really get under the skin of what makes something good. I then start messing around with all those bits and try to make something better. From that morphed its way into sort of several different food businesses that I've done and it just seems to be my way of doing it now. It's incredible, but you've eluded a couple of times to leaving your racing car career behind. It's very challenging, isn't it, to reinvent yourself when you've been known for one particular thing and your family know you was like your friends and people are proud of you and all the other things. To then completely reimagine an entire career, I know from friends who've been professional athletes or professional, you know, something or another like that in the public eye in many respects to then suddenly starting a different business. It's a huge transition, but that drive and like you say that attention to detail of what you need to do to be the best to be better actually translates really beautifully into something like a food business where there are so many small elements that all need to be looked at that it actually really lends it to itself to it, doesn't it? It really does. Yeah, I just, my bed's now hardwired and I can't really sort of look at a problem many other way and I get a big kick from the problem of solving so it's, I feel very fortunate that I've found something that just works great for me and yeah, and this business is perfect for that because well, small, starting a small business is like whack a mold with problems because you're just constantly finding new things to try and fix and improve and develop and then as soon as you fix that it creates a bottleneck somewhere else because that's not better and it can be soul destroying because it's so much work, but again, I love it and just that constant development and improvement and trying to make everything as good as it could possibly be. I think there's a resilience though that comes from the world of professional sport. It's a, which tennis player was it? Nadal, one of them gave a speech where he kind of talked, oh yeah, I'm the best tennis player in the world, but don't forget, I actually only won 51 of my points ever. I'm every point I won, I lost one except I won one more, one percent more and that made me the best in the world and it was this kind of real reframing of you have to take punches all the time, you have to take and accept, I've got to lose one and now, whilst I'm playing that point, it's the most important point in the world and now it's not important at all because I'm on the next one. You've got to move on and I think running a small business is exactly like that. The machine broke, let's not go on and on about it, we fixed it now, move onto the next thing because you are constantly, let you say there's the kind of highs and lows of running a business where you're like, they called me back, they didn't call me back, I'm still chasing them, this is happening, something's broken, I don't have enough, the supplier won't do it, the labels aren't coming, there's just so much, isn't there? I think I probably just said everything, you just said verbatim to my fiancée the other day coming home because it's basically a second, that's been my last couple of weeks, yeah, the highs and lows dropping, dropped samples into an age of supermarket recently, really really exciting, got back to the factory, one of the pieces machinery blew up, started fixing that, then the other blew up, it's relentless. It's relentless, but it's amazing, for people listening at home, we're very lucky that there are people like you creating delicious wonderful products like this, there's such a beautiful amount of innovation that's going on in the food and drink industry, which is around flavour, it's around quality ingredients, it's around nutrition, you know, pickles are so good for you, aren't they? I mean, it says on the side here, you can even drink the brine, is that true? Responsibly, yes, it does happen, you can whack a straw in it if you fancy. Is it a bit like- I mean, I do think that there is a whole movement for this, for I remember Wimbledon last year, everyone was drinking shots of pickle juice, so at some point, I hope to put it into little bottles, but that's a whole bottling line that's- A whole empty line yet to cut me. Six figure investment, I could do with that right now. Well, I mean, otherwise, people buy electrolytes, don't they, which is essentially just salt in a sticky, sweet liquid to put back thing, you know, after you've done exercise and you've sweated a lot, you've lost a load of salt, so you drink salty water. Why not drink really delicious pickily water that's actually really good for your gut? To the words out my mouth, yeah. Love it. I love it. It's so good. So what other innovation have you got? Are these your two flavours at the moment? This is the focus. Yeah, two for now. We've got a third one on the way, which I'm really excited about. It's kind of hard to not talk something like I'm blind too much to my back side, but they're like, I'm so excited. Cool. I've never actually been a massive fan of spicy pickles in the past. I've never ever had them. I've always found them too hot or not very spicy or whatever. But anyway, using some super high quality pecan smoked Mexican chipotle and I know smokey and pickle probably don't sound like they're going to be very good friends, but it somehow it works so well. And there's sort of smokey depth of aroma with all the pickled art. They're, yeah, I'm very excited. So I've come through a couple of jars myself. Yeah, no, I'm all about the smoke. I think it's um, it's delicious. I've got a smoked vinegar at home that is my secret ingredient, not very secret, since I'm telling you and goodness knows however many other people. But I put a little bit of that into lots of different dishes and I have so many people coming back to me, be like, what have you done to this? It's incredible. And I think the smokiness and the vinegar actually sits together really beautifully. Yeah, like a few cucumbers in there and that's, it sounds a lot like what we're going to be doing. Jobs are good and so good. Yeah. And there's something we had Hugh Griffith from the smoke come on and he was telling us about the origins of why that smoky flavour is so intoxicating to us as humans because it's kind of taking us back to our origins where we used to cook around a fire and cooking around a fire and the smokiness of that. Literally, it takes you back to this kind of inherited memory where you loved this kind of smokiness and it really makes you feel comforted and it tastes better and all the things. And pickle format. Yeah, let's say that from very excited about them. So yeah, it's just, it's just the challenge of adding another product in, you know, we're such a small business. We don't, and it might sound crazy considering we're supplying into a cardinal stuff, but we don't actually have a single staff member at the moment. I just use agency staff production and then I do everything else. So wow. Yes, so that is quite challenging. I mean, I will, you can obviously solve the problem of the staff down my line, but it's just this kind of baby steps of growing the business that I didn't have enough hours a week to be able to justify getting even some of like a 20 hour contract. Just trying to get everything to work and this constant tightrope walk of cash flow. I think it's a great model. Actually, some of the best businesses I've seen over the last 20 years have been on that model of maybe, maybe even at the end when they're getting ready to move on to the next thing or the exit plan or whatever it is that was right for them. There's maybe only one or two employees in the business and everything is being done through kind of contracted and freelancers. And why not? Why not pull in people who are really brilliant at a specific task and task them to do that specific thing? Brilliant. I think there's a really viable and sustainable model. Having lots of staff doesn't always solve lots of problems. It can create as many as it solves. It can create a lot of problems. Yeah, again, I just felt like particularly when I was getting, well, so when it first started, I was working, because you know, I got red to pay and stuff, I was working my job. So I was working that four days a week and then three days a week on pickles, but there was no way I was going to be able to get any staff member to sign up to that sort of working week. So I just used the agency staff and then as it sort of grown and grown and grown, I kind of made sense to just stick with that model. So for the time being, I'll get some really good people in at some point, but for now it's working for us great. Part time mums, honestly, they're like dynamite. Absolutely. The best people I've ever employed by, they just come in, get the job done, no fuss, but they're out the door at 230 because they've got the school run. They're just incredible. So, bigger picture, what is pickle project and I look like in a few years time, if everything goes as you can see it in your visions, and I know you'll be visualising things because you used to be a racing car driver. So you know, all right, you're all be all over that. That is a very interesting question that I asked myself all the time and actually vision wise, I mean, you know, have fantasy of growing excerpts in every supermarket and we go to Europe and then unileveled by it for a hundred million quid or whatever, that'd be wonderful. But I know from my many torpedoed dreams that I've had in the past, not so flinging too tightly to those sort of sometimes pipe dreams, you know, because something like COVID pandemic will come along, I'll completely append everything. So I tend to work on sort of a 12 months ahead of kind of strategy and then take each day as it comes. You know, I had a rough business plan at cash flow forecasts at all that sort of stuff in place for when I started the business I knew what I was coming into. Did you, you're the only person I've ever known who did, but I do actually believe you because you're quite into the detail. No one else does. Everyone else is like, this tastes good. Should I do it? My mum and my best mates say yes and they go. Well, I really, I wanted to be really, really, really sure, but I also knew I wanted, didn't want to go in halfway. You know, I'd done the street food thing. I'd done standing in markets in the rain. I don't want to do the traditional sort of small food business thing of make it in my home kitchen, go and sell it at a, you know, a cheese market or whatever. Make a couple hundred quid, like I wanted to go in, go for it, which meant straight away I want to be supplying restaurant chains through, you know, suppliers like bid food and breaks and that kind of stuff. So if I'm going to go for this, I need to do some investment and then there's no turning back, which is why it was like, okay, I better do a cash flow. I better do really think about this. So I did really, really do the detail coming into it. Yeah, and it's, it's a, it's a good idea, but one of the things that occurred to me is you said on in some of the research you'd said, you're not trying to cure cancer or climate change. They're just pickles, but it's, I disagree actually because if you are going to be ambitious and go into all of these big companies like breaks and bid food and you have a product that is clean and it's nutritious and it's a lot of things that a lot of the other alternatives are not good for you, good for the planet, good for everything. Then you are doing that. It's just like, like you said, it's this is, this is literally like the turn of the nut. This is like small incremental changes across our entire food structure, which will be improved by products, better quality, better tasting, more nutritious products. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I could to be quite honest, I was, I was, my initial inspiration to start the business was based on, I won't name the supplier, but their, their own brand pickles that I was getting for my restaurant business, was so phenomenally disgusting. I just thought, like, you'd almost have to try to make them that unpleasant. I'm like, why couldn't they have just made something that was vaguely nice? And also you read the label and there was so many chemicals in it and there's food coloring and all kinds of stuff. So why doesn't someone do, you know, reasonably affordable, but really high quality stuff for restaurants. And that was the original, the first idea that I had and then obviously I saw in supermarkets. Oh, there's a big hole here and then I saw on, you know, there was like 10 billion views for pickle related content on TikTok and it's like, right, okay, alarm bells are ringing. There's an opportunity here. This is the whole thing. Yeah, exactly because this is all the good, that good bacteria, the good fermentation, all the good things. And you might not be a kombucha or a kimchi eater. This is like the British alternative to really good preservation of vegetables salad, I guess. Where do you get your cucumbers from? I can't believe I haven't even asked this. They predominantly come from the continent. So this time of year, they'll become from Spain. Otherwise, it's coming from Holland. We will, both from the UK, whenever we possibly can. Depressingly, the cost is quite prohibitive. Is it? To get them from the UK. Yeah, they're grown in such enormous quantities in Europe that, and as a little fledgling business, we run pretty tight margins. I guess the season's quite short in the UK, where it's warm enough, wet enough, like the combination of everything to create cucumbers. It is all they have to do in greenhouse and use giant gas heaters, which is, yeah, that's a bit of a, a middle finger to the environment running those things for. Right. Yeah. So it's actually better to import them from abroad than it is to have locally grown. That's really interesting. Yeah. So yeah, like I said, I would love to be able to buy them from from the UK. And also the fact that we cannot for love and all money by actual little pickling cucumbers, so you know, like you're birkin in a jar. Can't get them. No one grows them in any volume in the UK. They are grown in Europe, but they seem to all be done to contract. Or they're grown seasonally and then packed into brine and then delivered to you and you have to decal, like, desulf them and then or desalame it. And then add your own brine flavors in, or strangely, you can buy them from India and the same process. So we have to use like a supermarket style sort of salad cucumber is basically what we can get our hands on in any volume. So that was a bit of a surprise coming into this as well. I didn't really think it would be quite so challenging. So at some point, I would love to be big enough and have the justify the volume to be able to get, you know, a couple of lorries a week, bring them over from Eastern Europe, but that's that's a bit far away at the moment. Yes, indeed. They're working on a system by where the producer works directly with a farmer and almost like I now kind of own slash rent that field and you're growing in that field for me what I need and I have to take all of it. So you're it's reducing the waste problem and then then when the producer has all of the product, lots of which can be used, some of which can't. It's forcing then innovation to do something with the wonky or the oversized or the undersized or whatever it is around the edges. So then it's not the farmer's waste problem. It becomes the producer's waste problem. The producer has more accessibility to solutions. It's really clever. There's such a like holistic way of fixing these things for it. It's not what brings it over to the UK. Yeah, let's do it. Be so good. Brilliant. Well, is there anything else you want to share? Oh yeah, where can we find you? We can find you in a cardo. We can find you in lots of different stores. What's your website for anyone who wants to follow or your Instagram? We are PickleProjects.co.uk and then on social media we are at our LY Good Pickles. Short for really good pickles. At Good Pickles. Brilliant. Well, we should follow you and find out what is next then. In the journey of the PickleProject, I'm very much looking forward to this Smokily Smoky. Is it Chipotle? Chipotle. It's going to be a Chipotle chip. Amazing. I'm very much looking forward to that. When's that going to launch? Most likely March. March. Okay. Brilliant. So very soon. Fantastic. Matt, thank you so much for giving up your time and expertise to come on the show today. My pleasure. Thank you for having me. Cheers, good luck with the next stage. Thank you. Thanks so much for listening to Food Rebels. So you don't miss out a more brilliant brand recommendations inside of tips and inspiring interviews. Please make sure you're subscribed to Food Rebels and drop a comment below. These simple actions, like subscribing or commenting, take just a few seconds. But they mean the world to us and it doesn't just help Food Rebels. It really helps to support the food brands and personalities we have on the show who are all trying to raise awareness. And if you know any brilliant brands or food founders or chefs or campaigners who have a really great story to tell then do let us know. 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