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Haggis, Born in TheUSA |
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Wed Jan 21, 8:22 AM ET |
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By Trevor Datson
LONDON (Reuters) - A tiny Scottish firm has teamed up with a U.S. company to start the first industrial-scale production in America of Scotland's national dish -- haggis.
Stahly Quality Foods, which employs just four people in the industrial new town of Glenrothes, believes the joint venture with a Chicago-based food processor can move 300,000 tins of the offal-based delicacy in its first year.
The estimated 10 million Scots and people of Scottish descent that live in North America offer an appetizing market.
But founder Ken Stahly's first venture into the United States was crushed by an import ban following the British foot-and-mouth disease outbreak of 2001.
"We were constantly getting e-mails and calls asking 'How can we get haggis over here?', Stahly said, as the Scottish diaspora across the globe prepares to toast the national bard Robbie Burns with haggis and whisky on January 25.
The U.S. launch is proving expensive for the firm, .
"It's cost us a fortune so far -- the lawyers were charging us $290 an hour just to draft things like confidentiality agreements that will hopefully just sit in a drawer. But the potential is huge," Stahly said.
Haggis is prepared in a sheep's stomach and is steamed or baked and served hot, but can also be revived when cold with a dash of scotch. Stahly will initially be offering two varieties from the Chicago plant -- traditional and vegetarian.
The recipes, like the identity of the U.S. partner, are a closely guarded commercial secret, but most traditional haggis contains liver, heart, tripes, oatmeal, suet and spices.
It also traditionally contains "lights," or lungs.
But "mad cow disease," or bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE (news - web sites)), which can be transferred to humans as variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (news - web sites) (vCJD), put a stop to that in commercial haggis production as lungs are deemed "high risk material."
HAGGIS HUNT
All of the ingredients used in the Chicago plant will be sourced locally to avoid U.S. import restrictions on British meat products -- the irony being that BSE most recently recurred in the United States.
Marketing could, however, prove a challenge. A recent poll of 1,000 U.S. visitors to Scotland, by haggis makers Hall's of Broxburn, found that 33 percent believed a haggis was an animal hunted in the highlands.
But Stahly has launched a haggis recipe book which the founder hopes will spread the word among American consumers, along with trade shows and exhibitions,. If the venture proves a success, Stahly hopes to expand the range, possibly in conjunction with a Scotch whisky company. The marketing synergies are potentially huge.
But so are the bureaucratic pitfalls.
Three years after U.S. customs returned a batch of Stahly's Scottish-produced haggis on foot-and-mouth fears, British customs authorities turned back a trial case sent from Chicago.
The whole history of the world is summed up in the fact that, when nations are strong, they are not always just, and when they wish to be just, they are no longer strong. - Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill
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